AWS EventBridge: Features, Pricing, and More
What is AWS EventBridge?
Amazon EventBridge is a service that helps in simplifying your application architecture, by making it easier to build scalable events from your applications, that can integrate with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Depending on the event source or trigger from an application, Amazon EventBridge offers real-time data to targeted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications like AWS Lambda.
In simpler terms, EventBridge in AWS handles events creation, delivery, authentication, and error handling. All these are managed to offer a highly scalable serverless event bus. It provides events services that connect your applications with data from more than one data source, with a stream of real-time data. It also allows you to create rules where data to build your application architecture will be sent in real-time to connected data sources and event publishers.
EventBridge and CloudWatch vary in different ways. CloudWatch Events employs rules and allows you to manage permissions on the AWS account’s default event bus. EventBridge expands on this functionality by introducing a slew of new features.
What are some of the uses?
The most common EventBridge use cases are:
- Amazon EventBridge enables you (Software Developer) to create routing rules that will determine where to send application data and distribute event-driven applications.
- Amazon EventBridge can be used in applications that publish messages to a huge number of subscribers that matches individuals’ interests following a certain pattern.
- It can help you integrate your application with other SaaS providers like Shopify.
How Amazon EventBridge Works
EventBridge will need an event source to start with, this could any AWS service, your Custom applications, SaaS or Microservices. When an event from either of the sources, say a File upload or an image upload is received, a schema discovery is executed. EventBridge confirms of the event is registered in the schema, and looks for the rules for the specific events, i.e. what to do with the upload, where is it to be sent to, or the notification that needs to be sent to a connected device.
AWS Eventbridge Features
API Destinations
This feature enables developers to send events back to Software as a Service Applications while controlling the throughput and authentication. Events can be sent to any web application that has an address. The feature can be implemented with fewer integrations, thus no need for custom code and additional infrastructure.
SaaS Integration
Your AWS applications can react to events generated by SaaS applications. Amazon EventBridge is natively integrated with many SaaS applications, including Datadog, OneLogin, Symantec, Whispir, and Zendesk. You do not need to manage any integration configuration, such as authentication events from your SaaS provider; they simply appear on your event bus.
Schema Registry
This enables the storage of events in the registry for other developers can search and access the events for your organization, removing the manual process of looking for other organizations’ events and structures. The registry also lets you generate code bindings for programming languages like Java, Python, or TypeScript directly in your IDE, allowing you to use the event as an object in your code. By enabling schema discovery for an event bus, event schemas are automatically discovered and added to the registry, eliminating the need to manually create a schema for an event.
Scheduled events
The popular Unix cron syntax can be used to schedule events. Scheduled events are generated on a regular basis and can invoke any of the target AWS services that are supported.
Monitoring and auditing
Amazon CloudWatch metrics, such as the number of times an event matches a rule or the number of times a target is invoked, can be used to monitor your event bus. Amazon CloudWatch Logs can be used to store, monitor, and analyze events that occur in your environment. AWS CloudTrail allows you to track calls to the Amazon EventBridge API.
Content-Based Event filtering
Rules can be used to filter events. Incoming events for a given event bus are matched by a rule and routed to targets for processing. A single rule can route to multiple targets, which are all processed concurrently. Rules enable different application components to search for and process events of interest to them. A rule can modify an event before it is sent to the target by passing only specific parts of it or overwriting it with a constant. You can also have multiple rules that match on the same event, allowing different microservices or applications to match events using different filters.
Other important features include:
- Fully managed and scalable event bus
- Decoupled event publishers and subscribers
- Reliable event delivery
AWS EventBridge Benefits
Pattern of Asynchronous Messaging
In many cases, EventBridge is one of the best ways to implement an asynchronous messaging pattern for a cloud system. EventBridge not only provides a loosely coupled architecture, but it also allows for: isolation of the components involved; easy extension or replacement of services; and a zero-waste architecture. These are the three essential characteristics of an asynchronous pattern implementation.
Simple to manage and scale
Event schemas and the Schema Registry make managing large-scale applications built on EventBridge much easier. These two features enable developers to discover and track templates for system event messages. This allows different developers (or teams) responsible for different components to account for and work on each other’s services through a centralized communication channel.
Serverless
When using EventBridge, there are no servers to provision or maintain. AWS, as usual, provides service quotas1 and SLAs on which developers can rely without worrying about whether the underlying infrastructure components will function when needed. This is especially useful if resilience is a primary goal when implementing an asynchronous architecture. The development team can remove concerns about infrastructure uptime, performance, and other issues by relying on AWS’s serverless offering.
AWS EventBridge Pricing
You pay for events published to your event bus, events ingested for Schema Discovery, and Event Replay with Amazon EventBridge. There are no extra fees for rules or event delivery. There are no minimum fees or commitments required. All AWS services publish free state change events.
Pricing illustration
If your SaaS application generated 3 million events in a single month, your charges would be as follows:
- Monthly events = 3 million events (all equal to or less than 64 KB each)
- Monthly event charges are calculated as 3M * $1.00/M = $3.00 per month.
AWS Real World Use Cases
Backup and storage
Storage and backup are critical components of any Cloud Computing service. AWS offers dependable storage services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storing large amounts of data, as well as backup services such as AWS Backup for backing up data stored in other AWS services. AWS stores the data in three different availability zones so that you can still access it if one fails. This makes AWS storage dependable and accessible. As a result, businesses with large amounts of application data to securely store and backup can benefit from AWS.
Big Data
Big Data is one of the most difficult challenges that businesses face today. Companies are having difficulty storing large amounts of data using traditional methods. They can store their data with AWS Big Data storage services even if the data limit unexpectedly increases because AWS provides virtually unlimited data storage with scale-in and scale-out options. AWS provides easy access and faster data retrieval. It provides data processing services such as EMR, which allow businesses to easily set up, operate, and scale their big data. As a result, one of the top AWS applications is efficiently storing and managing Big Data.
Learning AWS EventBridge
Cloud Academy offers multiples Amazon Web Service training courses, labs, and learning paths about EventBridge:
