Event Streams overview

IBM® Event Streams for IBM Cloud® is a high-throughput message bus that is built with Apache Kafka. This managed Kafka service is optimized for event ingestion into IBM Cloud® and event stream distribution between your services and applications. Event Streams was previously known as Message Hub.

You can use Event Streams to complete the following tasks:

• Offload work to back-end worker applications.
• Connect Event Streams to streaming analytics to realize powerful insights.
• Publish event data to multiple applications to react in real time.

Event Streams offers a fully managed Apache Kafka service, ensuring durability and high availability for our clients. By using Event Streams, you have support around the clock from our team of Kafka experts.

By being built with Apache Kafka, our offering directly benefits from all the innovation that occurs in the community and supports Kafka client APIs, Kafka Streams, and Kafka Connect. Kafka is highly reliable and lets you build scalable data pipelines for many use cases, including connecting microservices, doing log aggregation, event sourcing, and stream processing.

Apache Kafka tools usually work directly with Event Streams, although you do need to provide more configuration because connections to Event Streams always authenticate by using credentials.

In Event Streams, applications send data by creating a message and sending it to a topic. To receive messages, applications subscribe to a topic and choose to either receive all the topic's messages, or to share the messages between them. Event Streams hosts and maintains the messages in an ordered sequence.