Do Event Portal’s Graphical Designer creates objects in event broker?

swapnil_mahajan

I am aware about Event Portal’s Graphical Designer and information mentioned

https://solace.com/blog/pubsub-event-portal-graphical-designer/ here. It helps Architects to design EDA and developers to understand the same for implementation. But Do these graphical design able to create the objects like queues, topics etc. in event broker service. Any thoughts with this.

BR, Swap

Tamimi

Hey @swapnil_mahajan - thanks for starting this conversation here. There are definitely many ways to port the gap between design and implementation with the Event Portal (EP). I will list them here:

1. Using the Event Portal Config Push functionality: You can push any application from event portal to your defined message broker directly from EP. As of today, this functionality is still early access so please reach out if you are interested to enable this on your instance of EP. This option is the easiest approach however you will have to follow the EP conventions, i.e. there is a limit to the deployment customization. Note that we have implemented best practices and conventions so that the off the shelf config push functionality would serve your needs
2. You can leverage the Solace Terraform provider and the Solace Event Portal REST APIs (found on https://api.solace.dev/) to fully customize how you want the mapping from EP to Broker to be. You can find more details about the Solace Terraform provider by doing a quick search on the community and google on that. Happy to provide more information on this if you like this option
3. We also have a couple of open source resources that auto generates terraform plans reflecting the full modeled event mesh (MEM) using the EP API. Some examples of using the EP API to auto generate solace terraform plans include https://github.com/TamimiGitHub/solace-terraform-provisioning. Note that this terraform plan does not leverage the new Solace Terrafrom Modules

Other resources:

If you are interested in CI/CD solutions to configuration push, you can leverage the EP runtime REST APIs to trigger a config push on an application. More information about this here https://api.solace.dev/cloud/reference/createapplicationchangerequestpreview . We also have other open source repos that leverage github actions to facilitate provisioning such as https://github.com/SolaceLabs/ep-scs-workflow (you can check the github actions directory for more information on how to use the github action)

Hope this helps!

zgl

Hello.

Do we have any updates on this feature?

In the designer, I created my application, set up the consumer queue, its configurations, and the topic subscription. How can I deploy it to the broker?
Do I need to manually recreate everything on the broker?

Aaron

Hey @zgl check out a few minutes of this Office Hours from a couple months ago: https://www.youtube.com/live/uiUXQHqNzEE?si=0tiAhNyujp9zOTWG&t=3160

swapnil_mahajan

Hey @Aaron Thank you so much. I am excited to try this out !

zgl

Thanks @Aaron.
What’s not clear to me is how to do that deployment. Do I need Terraform, an Event Management Agent, or something else for it?

dmacrae

Hi @zgl, We just released the Self-service Access to Event Data in the Runtime feature set as GA last week, so we are excited for you to try it. See here for more details on the feature.

To deploy the required configurations on the broker(s) in the runtime for the application interfaces that you defined in Event Portal, you need to install and set up an Event Management Agent (EMA). The EMA is what connects to the brokers in the runtime and does the actual push of the config changes to give the applications access to the events.

Currently, the EMA is only supported as self-managed, which means you have to deploy, setup, and host it yourself. It comes in the form of a docker container and it is easy to deploy and setup following the guidance right in the Event Portal UI. Also, this 'how-to' video demo can help you deploy and setup the EMA. Note that although, that video only references the Event Portal Discovery and Audit use cases for the agent (as it was created before Config Push was supported by the agent) it is the same for pushing config changes to the Solace event brokers.

I should also mention that we are currently working on delivering a PubSub+ Cloud managed Event Management Agent. This means that the EMA deployment, hosting, setup, and upgrades will all be fully managed by Solace PubSub+ Cloud. You just have to do a few clicks in the UI. This will make it much easier to setup these connections from Event Portal to your cloud-manage broker services. Check out this 'How-to' demo video to see how simple we are making it. The first version of the cloud-managed EMA it will support connections to broker services in Private and Dedicated datacenter regions, and will be available in December (2024). We will add support for brokers in public regions after that.

If your brokers are cloud managed and deployed in Private or Dedicated regions and you would like to try out an early access version of the cloud manage EMA before we release the GA version, please let us know!

zgl

Thanks @dmacrae!
I'm glad to hear there's a plan for a fully cloud solution managed by Solace.