Solace, the leading enabler of event-driven architecture (EDA) for real-time enterprises, is first company to add distributed tracing capabilities to an EDA platform so companies can trace the step-by-step progress of event-driven information from end to end as it makes its way through a series of applications, environments and event brokers.
PubSub+ Distributed Tracing, which is now generally available, emits trace events from client libraries and the event broker in OpenTelemetry, the most popular tracing format that enables customers to collect, visualise, and analyse trace information in any compatible tool, such as DataDog, Dynatrace, Jaeger, Splunk and more.
“Our new distributed tracing capability enables IT organisations to reduce development time by debugging complex event flows during system test, and more quickly troubleshooting issues that inevitably come up in production environments."
,Shawn McAllister, CTO and CPO, Solace.
McAllister added: “PubSub+ Distributed Tracing also complements monitoring tools by providing granular information about information flow that lets organizations optimise the responsiveness of their applications for better customer experience, and demonstrate compliance with regulations related to data governance, lineage, and provenance.”
Along with logs and metrics, distributed tracing is one of the three pillars of observability, which gives enterprises the ability to find and fix many types of problems anywhere in their system.
According to Gartner: “Applications that have been developed with observability will allow for significantly faster investigations into outages, particularly in complex environments. This will result in shorter resolution times and improved development efficiencies allowing fast turnaround times for new features.”
Facilitating the lifecycle management of events
Solace recently reaffirmed its ongoing Event Horizon commitment to advancing the state of EDA, punctuated by several new strategic partnerships, community education program achievements and product enhancements, including the launch of a new distributed tracing capability.
The latter half of 2022 saw Solace release a major new version of its event management product, PubSub+ Event Portal. One of the biggest additions to the product is new lifecycle management capabilities that enable customers to manage event-driven applications and event flows from cradle to grave, across design-time and run-time environments. Key features like fine-grained role-based access controls, object versions, lifecycle states and environments enable customers to increase event reuse and ensure consistent development practices and governance. Support for Event API Products also allows companies to treat their events like the digital assets they are and release them as data products, which are very useful for Data Mesh and event-driven integration use cases.
In addition, the company released a collection of open-source plugins that integrate the most popular software development lifecycle (SDLC) tools – such as Ansible, GitHub, Jenkins, Postman and Slack – into the development and evolution of event-driven applications with PubSub+ Event Portal. Read more in our blog.
Simplifying the integration of EDA technologies: Kafka, IBM MQ and more
Solace has made it easier to integrate popular EDA technologies so companies can ensure the real-time delivery of information across diverse environments and application integration platforms.
For example, Solace recently unveiled a broker-integrated bridge for Apache Kafka that reduces the cost and complexity of integrating any Kafka environment, including Confluent, Azure Event Hubs and AWS MSK, into an event-driven system powered by PubSub+.
The company also announced a new family of open-source connectors, starting with an IBM MQ connector that is available now. Connectors for JMS and TIBCO EMS are coming soon, and more will follow. All of the connectors support high availability and the display of metrics and can be easily integrated with your existing monitoring tools.
These and other product enhancements were recently spotlighted in Solace’s December 2022 Product Update.
Expanding the EDA partner ecosystem with SAP, AWS and others
One of the biggest developments in EDA in 2022 was SAP’s announcement of a new service called SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, which is powered by Solace technology. As SAP vice president for marketing and solutions management Christopher Aron explained in an October 2022 blog post:
“Customers will also benefit from less vendor complexity by leveraging SAP for both their integration and event management needs. SAP through SAP Integration Suite provides a holistic approach to integration needs covering process integration, API Management and support for event driven architectures. SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh now adds to these capabilities providing specialized capabilities for high-volume events.”
Solace also continues to advance the state of the art of API management so companies can manage the asynchronous APIs associated with EDA as easily as they manage the synchronous RESTful APIs they’ve built and continue to rely on. In October 2022, the company announced an agreement to work with Gravitee.io to bring to market a unified API management experience for synchronous RESTful and asynchronous event-driven APIs.
“This integration allows organisations to accelerate their modernisation initiatives by securely connecting client and consumer applications across their enterprise in real-time via an event mesh powered by the Solace PubSub+ Platform."
Rory Blundell, chief executive officer at Gravitee.
“This will enable organisations to manage, secure and govern their entire API and event landscape with one integrated solution," he added
Finally, Solace took significant steps to make its EDA solution more easily accessible through other solution providers. The company joined Amazon’s AWS Accelerate program, made its solution available via Singtel Paragon, and was accepted into the Docker Verified Publisher program.
Improving the market’s understanding of EDA
As part of its effort to inform IT leaders and practictioners about EDA strategy, Solace ran a successful EDA Summit virtual conference in May 2022, along with a series of webinars under the EDA Summit Series brand. Moving forward, Solace is announcing it will host the third annual EDA Summit on May 10, 2023, with a call for papers commencing shortly to encourage subject matter experts to propose presentations.
Solace also continues to expand its efforts to educate IT professionals about the effective implementation and application of EDA with a robust set of courses and associated certification exams, most notably its “EDA Practitioner” certification program which grew 46% in 2022 and has been successfully completed by more than 875 individuals. Interest in EDA education continues to accelerate – over 2,600 individuals have been trained and certified through Solace’s education program since its inception in mid-2020, and another 1,800 are set to be certified in the very near future.
EDA Market Leadership
Launched in 2019, Solace’s Event Horizon initiative is geared to help businesses adopt, manage and leverage EDA at enterprise scale so they can become more real-time in their operations and customer interactions. The initiative consists of goals and activities set out by Solace to invest in EDA product innovation; build a coalition of vendor partners united in enabling event-driven systems at enterprise scale; advance the state of open source projects; and nurture global EDA community-building through education, networking and thought leadership.
Event Horizon is about advancing the state of EDA – not just the technology itself but its role in business strategy, partner ecosystems, and the professional development of IT professionals looking to master key concepts that are enabling the next generation of enterprise IT,” added McAllister. “It’s exciting to see EDA gaining recognition and momentum as more companies reap the rewards of EDA, and key solution providers like AWS and SAP evolve their offerings in ways specifically designed to help companies reorient around the principles of EDA.”
