TriggerMesh has launched Shaker, an open-source alternative to AWS EventBridge. Shaker enables engineers to capture, transform and deliver events from a range of out-of-the-box and customer event sources using a single solution. The solution delivers the ability to build event-driven applications at scale while reducing costs, delivering it faster without needing specialist Kafka skills.
The Shaker project already contains several key features that provide developers with a way to consume heterogeneous events simply. Running on Docker or Kubernetes, Shaker can capture events from all major cloud providers, SaaS or customer applications and deliver them without needing code. A new Common Line Interface (CLI) makes it easy for developers to manage events from across the software architecture of an organisation.
TriggerMesh calls out several advantages of Shaker, including-
- Unified eventing: TriggerMesh provides a unified way to work with events (using the CloudEvents specification) and provides access to the most popular event sources and targets in AWS, Azure and GCP out of the box.
- Easy transformations: TriggerMesh includes a transformation engine based on a simple DSL but also offers code-based transformations when more flexibility is needed.
- Maintainable over time: Make changes to TriggerMesh simply by updating configuration, no deep dives into code and no complex build cycle. Easily onboard new people. Implement GitOps-style workflows.
- Agility, scalability, and reliability: As TriggerMesh decouples producers and consumers and handles reliable delivery between them, it is easy to add and remove consumers and producers and scale them independently.
- Easily embedded into existing platforms or products: Can be added to any existing K8s cluster or simply run with Docker, providing the flexibility needed to embed and integrate with existing software (Apache 2.0 license).
Sebastien Goasguen, TriggerMesh co-founder and CEO commented, “Developers and platform engineers are craving a simple eventing solution to support faster innovation and application modernization within their organizations. The Shaker open-source AWS EventBridge alternative project will appeal to most DevOps, SREs, and platform engineers who are looking for a one-stop shop to produce and consume events in order to build real-time applications.”
Event-driven applications are the next evolution of integrations
The Shaker project provides an event broker and CLI that enable organisations to only execute events as required rather than constantly have applications listening for events. It helps to create the kind of event-driven architecture that ManoMano did when it combined Knative and TriggerMesh to reduce the number of idling containers that waste valuable computing resources.
For ManoMano, it significantly simplifies and improves their benchmarking and performance testing of the ManoMano stack. It enabled their development team to build serverless applications that only run when needed, reacting to events captured and routed in real-time. This has helped decrease compute usage, reduce costs and lower CO2 footprint.
The move to event-driven architecture is not new, with Gartner predicting that by 2022 event notifications will form part of over 60% of new digital business solutions. Whether this has happened is debatable, but with solutions such as Shaker emerging, it makes that number seem more attainable.
James Watters, CTO Modern Application Platform at VMware, commented, “Enterprises are looking for ways to innovate faster using eventing solutions. As large corporations need to quickly integrate new event sources to enable their developers to build event-driven applications, they can utilize TriggerMesh to bring a unified eventing experience to their own platforms.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Event-driven architectures are the next generation of software, whether retrofitted to existing architectures or created from scratch with a micro-services approach.
Can the Shaker project make a difference? As an alternative to AWS EventBridge, it provides organisations with choice and helps them avoid vendor lock-in. Details of Shaker are available on GitHub, and developers can create their first event flow in under five minutes on any computer that runs Docker, whether using AWS, Azure, GCP, Kafka, or simply HTTP webhooks. TriggerMesh has already created a Slack channel that developers can join.
Kate Holterhoff, an analyst at RedMonk, said, “The paradigm of event-driven architecture has become increasingly important to the process of application development and enterprise modernization. The Shaker project from TriggerMesh is an open-source solution for developers and platform teams to unify events across disparate sources and connect their own platforms to new event sources.”
