Within the realm of open-source streaming platforms, Apache Kafka and Apache Flink stand tall as highly acclaimed names. Renowned for their exceptional scalability, reliability, and fault-tolerance, they often loom as formidable options. Yet, a prevailing notion persists that Kafka and Flink might appear too intricate, especially to those taking their first steps.
IBM Event Automation transforms mere records and messages into real-time actionable events. This means that rather than simply knowing something has happened, you can use business logic to automatically respond at a large scale in real-time. It combines the power of Kafka and Flink and offers it with a powerful no-code tool along with Event Governance that let user focus on building their event integration logic and automatically harness the power of these acclaimed technologies.
There are myths related to IBM Event Automation, its positioning, and the competitive landscape. In this article, focus will be to confront these preconceived notions directly and figure out why IBM Event Automation is a winning combination.
Myth:"IBM Event Automation is a new name for IBM Event Streams."
IBM Event Automation is much more than Event Streams. IBM Event Automation is designed to liberate events from existing systems, transport them to where they are needed, and process them to generate actionable insights that would otherwise remain hidden in raw streams of events.
It comprises of three capabilities-
1- Event Streams - Connect and collect streams of real-time business events with enterprise-grade Apache Kafka
2- Event Endpoint Management - Event Endpoint Management provides the capability to describe and catalog the APIs of Kafka event sources, and to socialize those APIs with application developers.
3- Event Processing - Define business situations in an intuitive, easy-to-use authoring canvas in order to act in real-time and automate decisions using no-code browser based tool based on Apache Flink
Myth: "No-code tools are not powerful enough for real-world applications."
This is a common myth about no-code low code tools. However, it is simply not true. No-code low code tools are just as powerful as traditional programming languages. They simply provide a different way of writing code. With no-code low code tools, you can build complex streaming applications that can handle millions of events per second. This makes it possible for data scientists,business analysts and less-technical users to build and deploy streaming applications using Apache Flink and Kafka without having to learn complex programming languages. IBM Event Automation is equally useful for programmers and improves their productivity.
Myth: "IBM Event Automation has less number of connectors."
IBM Event Automation has recently added a new set of strategic connectors to its catalog and tripled the connector count and working to increase it further. There are a lot of community connectors for Kafka where support is provided by application vendor itself so you are covered. You can reach out to IBM if there are any specific connectors you need support for.
Myth: "IBM Event Automation is costlier than its competitor."
Many of competitors initial pricing seems attractive but as customer grows on streaming applications footprint prices shoot up exponentially whereas IBM Event Automation is reasonably priced and Total cost of ownership(TCO) in long term puts IBM at a very competitive advantage.
For example related to Kafka deployment, many competitors charge for all Kafka related components like every Zookeeper, REST interface, Control layer whereas IBM only charges for the number of cores assigned to the core Kafka components which deliver value at scale. All related components mentioned above are not charged for. Similarly, competitors have a complex additional pricing for connectors whereas you get inclusive pricing with IBM. This makes IBM a reliable and cost-effective option
Myth: "IBM Event Automation is not open-source."
Many of competitors which claim to be open-source proponent are actually focused on pushing proprietary extensions that lock you into their proprietary build of Kafka (i.e. tiered storage) and Flink. IBM Event Automation is based on open source technology like Strimzi operator for Kafka, which assures you avoid any vendor lock-in
Myth:"I use Kafka from other vendor or open-source, so I cannot use Event Automation."
IBM Event Automation is a truly composable solution, so you can chose capabilities you are interested in. For example, if you are using Kafka from other vendor, you can still use Event Endpoint Management and Event Processing capabilities and it will work seamlessly with your existing Kafka infrastructure.
Myth: "Kafka Streams APIs are better than Flink for event processing."
Apache Flink is the popular choice and gaining traction to be leading stream processing for deployment at scale. And it's not just about new companies;existing vendors are also exploring solution with Flink. IBM Event Automation offers a no code tool(Flink based) to design flows which involved co-relating data streams with advanced windowing techniques.Kafka Streams APIs serve its own purpose for limited use-cases and it is also supported by IBM Event Automation
Myth: "IBM Event Automation does not offer Policy Administration and Governance."
Event Endpoint Management capability let user build a self-service catalog of event sources for users to securely browse and utilize. It incorporates a management and governance solution, enabling event streams to be discoverable and reusable by everyone in secured manner, thereby accelerating the speed of doing business.
Myth: "IBM Event Automation lacks - Monitoring and Observability story."
IBM Event Automation recommends IBM Instana which is the gold standard of incident prevention with automated full-stack visibility. It provides real-time observability metrics with data at a granularity of 1 second, traces end-to-end application transaction and provides full context across the applications. IBM Event Automation also works with external tools like - Datadog, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus etc