What Are Event Brokers?

An event broker is middleware that mediates the communication of event messages between producers and consumers using the various message exchange patterns. Event-driven architecture (EDA) uses event brokers to provide the messaging infrastructure.

An event broker can be a hardware appliance, software, or software-as-a-service (SaaS). You can include appliance event brokers, software event brokers, and event broker services in your EDA, and event brokers of different types such both Solace and Kafka event brokers.

Applications and devices that produce and consume events are clients of an event broker. When an application publishes an event message, the event is sent to an event broker, which then routes the event on to subscribing clients.

An event broker can be a hardware appliance event broker, software, or software-as-a-service (SaaS). You can include appliance event brokers, software event brokers, and event broker services in your EDA, and event brokers of different types such both Solace and Kafka event brokers.

Clients

The producers and consumers that connect to the event broker are client applications. Clients connect to the event broker using a client username. Event brokers have client profiles and ACL profiles that can be assigned to client usernames to manage connection properties and the topics that clients can publish and subscribe to. For more information, see Using Client Profiles and Client Usernames.

Now that you know what event brokers are, lets move on to Understanding Topics.