IBM Event Streams for IBM Cloud® is a high-throughput message bus built with Apache Kafka. It is optimized for event ingestion into IBM Cloud and event stream distribution between your services and applications.

Event Streams provides a REST API to help connect your existing systems to your Event Streams Kafka cluster. Using the API, you can integrate Event Streams with any system that supports RESTful APIs.

The REST producer API is a scalable REST interface for producing messages to Event Streams over a secure HTTP endpoint. Send event data to Event Streams, utilize Kafka technology to handle data feeds, and take advantage of Event Streams features to manage your data.

Use the API to connect existing systems to Event Streams. Create produce requests from your systems into Event Streams, including specifying the message key, headers, and the topics that you want to write messages to.

The REST producer API is available as part of the Event Streams Standard and Enterprise plans only.

You can download the OpenAPI specification compliant descriptors for this REST interface. Alternatively, click the three vertical dots next to the IBM Event Streams REST Producer title in the top left corner of this app, then click the Download OpenAPI definition link that appears.

For more information about Event Streams, see What is Event Streams?.

IBM Event Streams also provides the following APIs:

• Event Streams REST Producer v2 endpoint API Reference

• Event Streams Admin REST API Reference

The URL for the API's endpoint is provided in the kafka_http_url property.

This API uses standard HTTP response codes to indicate whether a method completed successfully. A 200 response indicates success. A 400 type response indicates a failure, and a 500 type response indicates an internal system error.

Use one of the following methods to authenticate:

• To authenticate using Basic Auth: Use the user and api_key properties of the above objects as the username and password. Place these values into the Authorization header of the HTTP request in the form Basic <base64 encoding of username and password joined by a single colon (:)>.

• To authenticate using a bearer token: To obtain your token using the IBM Cloud CLI, first log in to IBM Cloud, then run the following command:

  ibmcloud iam oauth-tokens
  

  Place this token in the Authorization header of the HTTP request in the form Bearer<token>. Both API key or JWT tokens are supported.

• To authenticate directly using the api_key: Place the key directly as the value of the X-Auth-Token HTTP header.

Note that producing to a topic using v2 endpoint of REST Producer API supports only bearer token authentication.

Event Streams is based on the open source Apache Kafka, therefore all SDKs are provided for by the open-source community, covering the core runtimes listed. For the most up-to-date information about these libraries refer to the project homepages. For example:

• Apache Kafka client for Java
• node-rdkafka client for Node.js
• confluent-kafka-python client for Python
• confluent-kafka-go client for Golang
• librdkafka client for C or C++

You can find details of what is supported by Event Streams at: Support summary for all recommended clients.

For information about how to install and use the SDKs, see Using the Kafka Java client.

For information about running a Java sample application that demonstrates how to connect to Event Streams and how to send and receive messages using the Kafka Java API, see IBM Event Streams Kafka Java console sample application.