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The Event Gateway combines both API Gateway and Pub/Sub functionality into a single event-driven experience. It's dataflow for event-driven, serverless architectures. It routes Events (data) to Functions (serverless compute). Everything it cares about is an event! Even calling a function. It makes it easy to share events across different systems, teams and organizations!
Use the Event Gateway right now, by running the Event Gateway Getting Started Application with the Serverless Framework.
Features:
The Event Gateway is a L7 proxy and realtime dataflow engine, intended for use with Functions-as-a-Service on AWS, Azure, Google & IBM.
The project is under heavy development. The APIs will continue to change until we release a 1.0.0 version. It's not yet ready for production applications.
Looking for an example to get started? The easiest way to use the Event Gateway is with the serverless-event-gateway-plugin
with the Serverless Framework. Check out the Getting Started Example to deploy your first service to the Event Gateway.
If you don't want to run the Event Gateway yourself, you can use the hosted version provided by the Serverless team. Sign up here!
There is an official Docker image.
docker run -p 4000:4000 -p 4001:4001 serverless/event-gateway --dev
On macOS or Linux run the following to download the binary:
curl -sfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/serverless/event-gateway/master/install.sh | sh
On Windows download binary.
Then run the binary in development mode with:
$ event-gateway --dev
The repo contains helm
charts for a quick deploy to an existing cluster using native nginx Ingress. To deploy
a development cluster you can follow the minikube instructions.
If you want more detailed information on running and developing with the Event Gateway, please check Running Locally and Developing guides.
Event Registry is a single source of truth about events occuring in the space. Every event emitted to a space has to have event type registered beforehand. Event Registry also provides a way to authorize incoming events. Please check Event Types reference for more information.
Discover and call serverless functions from anything that can reach the Event Gateway. Function Discovery supports the following function types:
Function Discovery stores information about functions allowing the Event Gateway to call them as a reaction to received event.
Lightweight pub/sub system. Allows functions to asynchronously receive custom events. Instead of rewriting your functions every time you want to send data to another place, this can be handled entirely in configuration using the Event Gateway. This completely decouples functions from one another, reducing communication costs across teams, eliminates effort spent redeploying functions, and allows you to easily share events across functions, HTTP services, even different cloud providers. Functions may be registered as subscribers to a custom event. When an event occurs, all subscribers are called asynchronously with the event as its argument.
Creating a subscription requires providing ID of registered function, an event type, an HTTP method (POST
by default),
and a path (/
by default). The method and path properties defines HTTP endpoint which Events API will be listening on.
Event Gateway supports two subscription types: async
and sync
. Please check Subscription Types
reference for more information.
sendEmail
function will be invoked for every user.created
event to <Events API>/myteam
endpoint.
http.request
EventNot all data are events that's why Event Gateway has a special, built-in http.request
event type that enables subscribing to
raw HTTP requests.
listUsers
function will be invoked for every HTTP GET request to <Events API>/users
endpoint.
One additional concept in the Event Gateway are Spaces. Spaces provide isolation between resources. Space is a coarse-grained sandbox in which entities (Functions and Subscriptions) can interact freely. All actions are possible within a space: publishing, subscribing and invoking.
Space is not about access control/authentication/authorization. It's only about isolation. It doesn't enforce any specific subscription path.
This is how Spaces fit different needs depending on use-case:
Technically speaking Space is a mandatory field ("default" by default) on Function or Subscription object that user has to provide during function registration or subscription creation. Space is a first class concept in Config API. Config API can register function in specific space or list all functions or subscriptions from a space.
Event Gateway has the first-class support for CloudEvents. It means few things.
First of all, if the event emitted to the Event Gateway is in CloudEvents format, the Event Gateway is able to recognize it and trigger proper subscriptions based on event type specified in the event. Event Gateway supports both Structured Content and Binary Content modes described in HTTP Transport Binding spec.
Secondly, there is a special, built-in HTTP Request Event type allowing reacting to raw HTTP requests that are not formatted according to CloudEvents spec. This event type can be especially helpful for building REST APIs.
Currently, Event Gateway supports CloudEvents v0.1 schema specification.
This project uses Semantic Versioning 2.0.0. We are in initial development phase right now (v0.X.Y). The public APIs should not be considered stable. Every breaking change will be listed in the release changelog.
The Event Gateway is NOT a FaaS platform. It integrates with existing FaaS providers (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, OpenWhisk Actions). The Event Gateway enables building large serverless architectures in a unified way across different providers.
SOA came along with a new set of challenges. In monolithic architectures, it was simple to call a built-in library or rarely-changing external service. In SOA it involves much more network communication which is not reliable. The main problems to solve include:
The following systems are solutions those problems:
The main goal of those tools is to manage the inconveniences of network communication.
The greatest benefit of serverless/FaaS is that it solves almost all of above problems:
Tools like Envoy/Linkerd solve different domain of technical problems that doesn't occur in serverless space. They have a lot of features that are unnecessary in the context of serverless computing.
Service discovery problems may be relevant to serverless architectures, especially when we have a multi-cloud setup or we want to call a serverless function from a legacy system (microservices, etc...). There is a need for some proxy that will know where the function is actually deployed and have retry logic built-in. Mapping from function name to serverless function calling metadata is a different problem from tracking the availability of a changing number of service instances. That's why there is a room for new tools that solves function discovery problem rather than the service discovery problem. Those problems are fundamentally different.