Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources and routes that data to targets like AWS Lambda. Recently, AWS introduced an event replay and archive capability - providing developers a way to replay past events and extend their applications with new functionality.
AWS released EventBridge in general availability last year at the AWS Summit event in New York. Moreover, earlier this year, the public cloud vendor has further enhanced the event bus cloud service with a schema registry capability. And now, it has another capability called event replay and archive - allowing developers to archive events so that they can easily replay them later by starting an event replay.
Danilo Poccia, a chief evangelist (EMEA) at Amazon Web Services, wrote about the GA of the new capability in a blog post:
Archives and replays work with all events process by EventBridge, including events from the AWS platform, from SaaS integrations, and your own custom events.
When creating an event bus through the EventBridge console, developers can configure the archive capability with the actions menu and set the events' retention period (ranging from zero days to infinite). Subsequently, they optionally set a pattern matching filter for which events to archive. At a later stage, when events run through the event bus, developers can replay the events by selecting the appropriate archive. Alternatively, developers can leverage the events archive and replay capability through the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), the AWS SDKs, and AWS CloudFormation.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-archive-and-replay-events-with-amazon-eventbridge/
A significant benefit of the archive and replay capability in EventBridge is the ability to reprocess past events. For instance, when an error occurs in the application that processes the events it receives, a developer can fix the application and feed the events from the selected archive to the fixed application again – assuming the application can process the events multiple times.
Providing an archive and replay capability, AWS further evolves EventBridge to make it a more competitive service than other cloud vendors that provide similar event bus services. For instance, Microsoft offers Azure EventGrid, which has been GA since the beginning of 2018 and received several updates, including advanced filtering, retry policies, and support for CloudEvents. However, the service lacks a schema registry and archive and replay capabilities, as does the recent preview release of Google's event bus service Eventarc.
Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
Even-driven architectures are essential for next-gen applications as they allow a dynamic, triggered workload. As such, they are ideally situated in the public cloud. Typically, they are a challenge to debug, so the new capability to archive and replay events streams like in AWS EventBridge is a crucial feature to create and manage event-driven next-gen apps more efficiently and with that more successful.
Currently, the event replay and archive are available in all commercial regions except for Mainland China and Osaka. Furthermore, pricing details are available on the pricing page and details on the EventBridge landing page.