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Deciphering EDA|
- By Sharmee Roy, Jun 15, 2008 2007 hrs IST
- Tags : Deciphering EDA
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From being niche, Event Driven Architecture (EDA) is gradually gaining acceptance in the mainstream market. Still in its early days in the market in India, EDA is essentially an architecture style or pattern for software for handling change of state(s) in a system (i.e. events) and for generation and delivery of corresponding response to the event to the automated and/or human users of that system. In short, EDA is a software architecture pattern based on the production, detection, communication, consumption of, and reaction to events.
So why is there a need for EDA? Today, the speed of business and competition has increased and organizations have to quickly respond to changing market needs, sense and grab business opportunities, also incorporate visibility into their processes and eliminate any threats and downtimes in real-time.
Increasingly, businesses are being carried out in a more collaborative manner, using the extended enterprise concept, mergers and acquisitions have increased, increasing the complexity of interaction within business processes and subsystems that exchange information and trigger events.
How does it work?
EDA listens for and detects an event and based on configured rules or filters it decides how to act on an event, what response to generate, where to route it, how to deliver it, and triggers the response. The response may be delivered in the form of message, notification, alert using various mechanisms such as display, email, voice alerts, inputs to automated components using Web Services, etc. It correlates multiple sequenced events, aggregates information across events, creates and helps to process complex events and shows results of events analysis, patterns on dashboards.
According to Ramesh Loganathan, managing director of Progress Software (India), in a typical SOA environment a business process is "triggered", that results in a set of orchestrated services to be performed.
"In EDA, some business activity "triggers" an event, which results in all the interested business functions receiving the event and then the required processing gets into effect. In SOA, a process is the starting point. In EDA, the event is the starting point, and a process being executed may be the end result of an event. That is the reason to why they are complimentary," he said.
SOA - EDA Relation
EDA and SOA are at some level complimentary. EDA is about business events and "reaction" to events, while SOA is about business processes and services.
Philosophically EDA is like a loosely coupled, asynchronous publish (i.e. record the occurrence of an event) and subscribe (i.e. create a response to the event) type of pattern whereas SOA is a largely synchronous, request and response (or command-and-control) type of pattern.
As explained by Satish Joshi, executive vice president & CTO of Patni, "EDA is useful for modeling event and response handling situations, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a style of architecting that is useful for modeling reusable, serviceable functionality, and interaction between its consumers which request a service and the provider of that service."
Trends
Interestingly, with SOA getting more acceptance in the enterprise solution design and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) slowly gaining in traction as a preferred services infrastructure, gradually a message-based enterprise integration is occurring. This brings forth the hitherto esoteric Event Stream processing (ESP) and Complex Event Processing (CEP) into the fore.
This trend is encapsulated in the emerging Event driven architecture (EDA) in the SOA context and at times also referred to as ED-SOA.
Loganathan added, "Now, even as there is widespread concurrence that SOA brings in the possibility of EDA being used for more mainstream business use cases, there is a lot of debate on exactly how EDA will blend in with SOA. Ranging from EDA being the 'new SOA', to EDA 'succeeding' SOA, to EDA 'extending' SOA, to undiluted skepticism of any relationship at all."
According to him, with ESBs in place, there is an enterprise wide services fabric. And this can be leveraged to feed business events, and process business events. The combination of event infrastructure and the ESB is a very powerful accelerator in EDA gaining mainstream traction.
The benefits
With EDA implementation, organizations are able to respond faster to important business events, and to sudden events such as threats and calamities, hazards within manufacturing plants, sense new business opportunities.
"EDA enables alerting prior to the happening of event and helps timely preparedness for the event or prevention of undesired events that could otherwise lead to huge costs. Event correlation reduces elimination of duplicate messages being passed to subsequent entities in the event flow reducing overload of messages, allowing users to concentrate on information relevant to them, on deriving intelligence from them in real time," informed Joshi.
EDA improves the overall decision making of the organization, operational efficiency and thereby cost
Related Links:
Changing Role of Enterprise Architecture: A Study
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