Apache EventMesh distributed event-driven multi-runtime

I. Foreword

On July 16th, I had the honor to attend

ArchSummit 2022 Global Architect Summit (Shenzhen Station)

, I only focus on the topic of "Cloud Native Frontier Technology Application", and I have only stayed in one venue for a day. The lectures of the teachers under this topic left me the deepest impression on the "Apache EventMesh" shared by PPMC Xue Weiming, a teacher of Apache EventMesh.EventMesh Distributed Event-Driven Multi-Runtime".

Before I didn't listen to Mr. Xue Weiming's sharing, I thought about whether there is a component that can decouple business and infrastructure (such as storage, cache, registry, message engine, etc.).Give two examples:

• is like
  Spring Cloud Stream, which decouples the upstream and downstream message engines,Spring Cloud Stream is used to build highly scalable event-driven microservices in the Spring Cloud system. The purpose is to simplify the development of messages in Spring Cloud applications, but this is limited to the decoupling of the message engine.

• Service Mesh in the cloud native field is more of an integrated RPC service, which is called synchronously and may have a certain degree of coupling.

Although all of the above have done well, there are still certain limitations in various aspects.

After listening to Mr. Xue Weiming's sharing of EventMesh, I found that EventMesh is a really fragrant event-driven architecture, which coincides with my idea, except that EventMesh has more complete functions and minimizes coupling, which is very goodTo expand and adapt to different types of service components, EventMesh will be a mainstream architectural trend in the future.

Second, what is EventMesh

Some friends may not know what this EventMesh is. I think it is necessary to give you a definition first, so that you can first know what this EventMesh is.what is it.

Apache EventMesh is a dynamic

decoupling

application and back-end middleware layerCloud native

event-driven

architecture infrastructure.It supports a wide range of use cases, including complex hybrid clouds, distributed architectures using different technology stacks.

The picture aboveWe can see that the location of EventMesh is a middle layer connecting cloud applications and infrastructure. Event Mesh has the same positioning as Service Mesh, and it supports cloud-native deployment methods and can run on Kubernetes.

Three, EventMesh Architecture

EventMesh itself provides a lightweight client, standardized interfaces and protocols.We mentioned above that the positioning of EventMesh is based on the middle layer of applications and infrastructure.Applications can access EventMesh through lightweight clients, thereby realizing decoupling from strong infrastructure binding.

The left part of the above figure is also an internal architecture of our EventMesh. EventMesh provides different types of APIs, including Java, Go, C, Python, etc.The middle part on the left is actually the runtime state of EventMesh, which itself supports the deployment of clustered Gateway, and also supports the deployment of containerized Sidecar.

EventMesh is mainly divided into the following parts: protocol, observability, processor, orchestration and storage.Different parts are plug-in processing, such as the protocol part supports HTTP, TCP, gRPC, MQTT, and internal communication will be converted into CloudEvents, which is equivalent to the function of the adapter.

Four. My thoughts

• For large-scale deployment of microservices (number of microservices>1000), high degree of internal service heterogeneity (interactive protocol/developmentLanguage type > 5), and the integrated microservices are loosely coupled and asynchronous.Using EventMesh is appropriate.However, the heterogeneous complexity of microservices and internal architectures faced by most developers may not be so high and they do not need asynchronous corresponding features. In this case, you need to choose suitable technologies according to your own business.stack and architecture model.

• EventMesh itself supports clustered Gateway deployment, and can also support containerized Sidecar deployment.

• EventMesh breaks data silos and supports enterprise full connectivity, digitization, and multi-cloud collaboration.

• Like this kind of open source software, although the atmosphere and development in China are getting better and better recently, many innovative open source products are still abroad.The open-source software for EventMesh, an event-driven architecture developed under the leadership of the company, is currently being developed by domestic first-tier manufacturers such as WeBank, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com, Ali, and Baidu.As an innovative open source software led by domestic companies, EventMesh, as an event-driven architecture, can be expected in the future.