On Event Meshes

Interesting look at the concept, a way to add some structure around events of importance, an element addressing the context of events.

Why Event Meshes Should Be On Your IoT Radar
By Alex Woodie in Datanami

We are instrumenting everything around us at a frenetic pace with the hope of using all that sensor data to improve our situational awareness and decision-making capability. But how do we plumb all the systems together in a simple and cohesive manner? That, in a nutshell, is the purpose of an event mesh, an emerging product category you’re likely to hear more of in the future.

Shawn McAllister, the CTO of Solace, is an expert on event meshes and recently briefed Datanami on the emerging field. As McAllister explains it, event meshes help to virtualize and simplify access to event data in the same way that service meshes help to virtualize and simplify access to IT services.

“An event mesh is another layer in your network that delivers events to you, no matter where you happen to be,” McAllister says. “It gives you the ability to take applications that may be deployed in your legacy environment, in your private cloud, and multiple public cloud environments, and have all those applications are able to interact and to receive whatever events they’re interested in.”

The event mesh starts with event brokers that are deployed close to the item being monitored, McAllister continues. Those event brokers are typically installed next to your legacy applications, which can now emit events into the event mesh, which routes them to consuming applications on the other side of the network.

It’s all about shrinking the physical world and making it more connected. Remote field locations, such as gas stations or grocery stores, can now be the source of an event that triggers an action half a world away. That means events, like purchasing gasoline, could trigger a machine learning system running in the Google Cloud to give the customer an offer, via the pump’s video screen, to get a discount on energy drinks purchased in the gas station’s mini-mart.  .... "