TriggerMesh Leverages Kubernetes to Simplify Building Event-Driven Apps

TriggerMesh this week launched a preview of a platform that promises to make it easier to integrate any type of event-driven application or service.

Designed to be deployed on top of a Kubernetes cluster, the TriggerMesh EveryBridge platform leverages open source Knative software originally developed to integrate serverless computing frameworks.

TriggerMesh CEO Mark Hinkle says TriggerMesh EveryBridge adds an application programming interface (API) to define Bridges along with support for a set of initial targets that includes Twilio, SendGrid, Slack, the AWS Lambda serverless computing framework and Tekton pipelines employed with a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

Those cross-platform integrations are similar to the bridges between event sources and targets that are created within an AWS cloud using the AWS EventBridge service, notes Hinkle. TriggerMesh EveryBridge is the only platform able to ingest events from any data source in a similar fashion and then trigger functions on any cloud or serverless cluster running on Kubernetes, he says.

That approach, he says, provides organizations with a cloud-native alternative to employing platforms such as Dell Boomi or Mulesoft to integrate applications and services.

The pending arrival of TriggerMesh EveryBridge comes at a time when more organizations are looking to employ event-driven architectures to drive a variety of digital business processes in near real-time. End users now expect to able to launch and track events spanning multiple applications and services. The challenge IT organizations have faced is finding a way to achieve that goal without having to hard code every integration themselves or rely on a cloud service that might be prohibitively expensive.

Kubernetes together with Knative middleware provide a foundation on which providers of integration platforms can reimagine how services and applications are pulled together to drive a specific business outcome or user experience. Hinkle says that as more IT teams are able to accomplish those goals within the context of a single cloud computing environment, it’s now only a matter of time before they will require similar capabilities spanning multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments.

In fact, in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations are trying to accelerate the development of digital business applications that depend on the integration of disparate services to drive a business process.

It’s also probable that many providers of legacy integration platforms will be re-engineering their platforms using cloud-native technologies as well. In effect, a race is now on to reinvent integration platforms using a mix of emerging technologies that lend themselves more easily to event-driven applications, which are the foundation upon which modern digital business applications are built. In fact, as event-driven platforms based on standard APIs become more widely employed, the cost of switching applications and services should drop as long as the API employed remains consistent.

Of course, event-driven application architectures have been around for decades. The adoption of event-driven applications has always been constrained in part because it’s easier to build a much less flexible batch-oriented monolithic application. The challenge has always been finding a way to enable developers to build distributed applications in a way that allows them to consistently process events in the right order. While the existence of a cloud-native framework for integrating applications and service doesn’t necessarily make those applications less complex, it should at the very least go a long way to making it easier to mix and match application services as any organization best sees fit.