Serverless platform EventMesh promoted to Apache top-level project

Published on April 13, 2023

The Apache EventMesh platform is a fully serverless platform that enables the development of distributed event-driven applications. It was recently promoted to a Top-Level Project of the Apache Software Foundation.

EventMesh provides serverless, event-driven capabilities for a wide variety of components and applications through a publish/subscribe pattern. The concept of an event mesh refers to a network of event brokers that facilitate the dissemination of event information across applications, cloud services, and devices within an organization. In the event-driven architecture, communication between various components is facilitated through events rather than traditional request/response interactions. Through an event mesh, microservices and applications can exchange information.

Since EventMesh is built on the CloudEvents specification, it is compatible with other cloud-based applications and systems; With the help of connectors, the middleware can be extended to connect with a wide range of messaging systems and data stores including Apache RocketMQ, Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, RabbitMQ, and Redis. Filtering and transformation capabilities allow users to route and transform events selectively based on their content and metadata; Serverless workflow engine enables users to develop scalable, event-driven applications with complex orchestration capabilities.

Additionally, EventMesh provides an SDK for Java that can be used to integrate EventMesh into a Java application. SDK supports synchronous, asynchronous, and broadcast messages using TCP, HTTP, and gRPC protocols. EventMesh Message, CloudEvents, and OpenMessaging formats are supported by the SDK. Since the release of version 1.7.0, Rust language support has also been added.

EventMesh describes its workflow using the Serverless Workflow DSL. CNCF Serverless Workflows is a vendor-neutral, open-source, community-driven ecosystem for the definition and execution of DSL-based workflows in the serverless technology domain. This specification describes workflows as a set of states used to describe control flow logic and is described using the AsyncAPI specification (similar to the OpenAPI specification for RESTful applications).

The Apache EventMesh project was originally developed at China’s WeBank and was open-sourced in September 2019 on GitHub. This was the first Chinese fintech project to be accepted into the Apache Incubator.

In 1999, the Apache Software Foundation was founded. It is the world’s largest open-source foundation, stewarding more than 227 million lines of code and providing over $22 billion in free software.