An Introduction To AWS EventBridge And Its Use Cases

?? Hello there! Welcome to The Serverless Spotlight!

In this week's edition, I talk about AWS EventBridge, what it is, what it helps you accomplish, its use cases, and the benefits it offers.

What Is AWS EventBridge?

EventBridge is a serverless event bus that allows you to easily connect multiple different AWS services as well as third-party tools.

With EventBridge you can route data from event sources (any AWS service, e.g. S3) to event targets (any other service, e.g. Lambda, DynamoDB).

EventBridge is an evolution of the deprecated CloudWatch Events. It was created to offer more features and greater flexibility.

But what exactly is it used for?

EventBridge acts as a central hub for events data in AWS and allows you to connect incoming events (such as an upload action in S3) with targets like Lambda functions or SQS queues.

EventBridge Usage

A typical example usage of EventBridge could be creating an automated image processing pipeline.

In this pipeline, every time an image is uploaded to an S3 bucket, you need to automatically resize the image and generate some thumbnails for different devices.

Here is how the pipeline would be implemented using EventBridge and Lambda:

1. A user uploads an image to an S3 bucket
2. When the image is uploaded, S3 generates an event with details of the file such as the object name, upload date, and bucket name, amongst others.
3. You then use EventBridge to capture the event by setting up an EventBridge rule to listen to events coming from this S3 bucket.
4. When an event is consumed, you can configure EventBridge to trigger a Lambda function.
5. This Lambda function will receive the image details from the event data and will perform the processing on the image such as resizing it and generating thumbnails, and finally reuploading this modified image back into the S3 bucket.
6. Optionally you can also push additional events to another service, such as an SQS message queue to notify a service of the image processing job.

Other Use Cases For EventBridge

There are many more typical use cases for EventBridge.

I've used EventBridge as a Lambda function scheduled to send automated emails on a schedule. I've also used it to update a DynamoDB item when events from S3 are captured.

I've also seen it used for more complex event routing, where it was routing events to multiple targets like Lambda, SQS, SNS, S3 and DynamoDB.

With EventBridge you can support use cases such as:

• Complex event routing for multiple targets
• Real-time data processing
• Scheduled functions
• Scheduled Emails
• Creating event-driven microservices
• Triggering an EC2 instance to restart if it is failing or unhealthy.

Benefits Of EventBridge

EventBridge can act as a powerful services decoupler and offers many benefits for serverless workloads.

• EventBridge helps your services scale and allows your application to handle large volumes of events coming from various sources.
• With EventBridge, like all most serverless services you only pay for the events you process, making it cost-efficient.
• Lossly coupling your microservices also makes your system more resilient to failures and more scalable.
• EventBridge can integrate with many serverless AWS services and a wide range of third-party tools such as Stripe, Datadog, Zendesk, Auth0, Adobe, MongoDB, and many more.

Conclusion

EventBridge is a cost-effective serverless solution that helps you create event-driven applications, serverless pipelines and process large volumes of events at scale.

It is especially useful for more complex routing of events to multiple targets in or out of AWS.

The ability to integrate EventBridge with many AWS services as well as third-party services makes EventBridge a powerful and flexible service for your serverless workloads.

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?? My name is Uriel Bitton and I hope you learned something in this edition of The Serverless Spotlight

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Uriel