Introducing EventBridge Atlas

I would like to introduce you to a new tool called EventBridge Atlas.

It has been developed to help engineers and organistations document and explore events within their Event-Driven architectures.

Motivation

I currently lead a small team of engineers and we have been using Amazon EventBridge for over a year now.

Amazon EventBridge has been an amazing tool to help us scale, remain decoupled and deliver features at a rapid pace (too fast sometimes 😅).

As time moves on our architecture has evolved.

But I feel a problem emerging....

Event creation and event discovery is not a thing that happens at the start of a project (Event Storming).

Event creation and discovery is organic.

As time goes on we will all face into these situations:

• Add/Remove events within our domain
• Change schemas/contracts on events
• Lose context on why events exist (as people move around)
• Scaling our engineering teams

It’s inevitable.

Our architecture today will evolve over time so it’s important that our knowledge evolves with it.

So then questions start to emerge:

• How can we help engineers understand events?
• How can we help engineers discover events?
• How can we understand the context of events?
• How can we see examples of events in action?

I feel that customisable documentation can help answer these questions.

I believe EventBridge Atlas can help answer these questions.

Stitching tools together

First thing I wanted to do was get a proof of concept together.

I wanted to find a tool that allowed me to write documentation quickly.

With some luck I stumbled across docuowl (which looked perfect!)

I have a soft spot for good API documentation and I'm a huge fan of Stripes API documentation and docuowl takes inspiration from that! Too good to be true 😍

It didn't take too long to get a basic proof of concept together.

Idea: Document EventBridge stuff for internal developers.

The idea is to allow us to add metadata to events, with schema and rules so people can understand how things work, and consume events.

Automatically built using aws-cli and Docker.

Progress so far 👇#eventbridge #aws pic.twitter.com/G5XK8EvASR

— David Boyne 🚀 (@boyney123) April 20, 2021

After the feedback from Twitter, I packaged up the code, wrote some documentation and EventBridge Atlas was born ⭐️!

How EventBridge Atlas works

EventBridge Atlas Architecture

The process is quite simple.

EventBridge Atlas uses AWS CLI and docuowl as the core of the application.

EventBridge Atlas takes your schemas and custom metadata, parses it into the format required for docuowl and serves up the results.

You can find out more on the documentation site.

Feedback

Anyway, enough about all that.

If you are interested in getting set up head over to https://eventbridge-atlas.netlify.app/.

Hopefully EventBridge Atlas will help you on your journey of Event Discovery and scaling Event Driven Architectures.

If you find the tool useful or have any feedback feel free to reach out on GitHub or Twitter.

Until next time!