Event Processing in Business Applications

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Event Processingin Business Applications

• Roy Schulte
• 15 March 2006

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Event Processing is a Bounded, Definable
Discipline We assume these definitions

• 1. First definition An event (ordinary
  event or real-world event) is a state change
  (something that happened) which is significant to
  someone for some purpose. Implication Not
  everything that happens is an event. A state
  change is an event only if you treat it as one.
  Many state changes are too fine grained,
  unimportant or lacking in identity to be events.
• 2. Second definition An event (software
  event or event object,) is an object, usually
  in the form of a message, that reports on a
  ordinary (type 1) event.
• 3. Event processing means computing that uses
  events (definition 2, not definition 1).
• Note 1 Ordinary events (type 1) may be
• (i) Simple or atomic, if they contain no
  meaningful (type 1) member events
• (ii) Complex if they reflect the significance
  of two or more member events, each of which are
  meaningful (type 1 events) in their own right
• Note 2 An event object (type 2) may report
  either a simple event or a complex event. A
  complex-event object (type 2) may be
• Raw or original, if it directly reports a
  complex event from the real world or
• Derived (synthesized) if it is generated by
  processing two or more type 2 events

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Event Processing Brings Two Kinds Of Business
Benefits
2. Complex-Event Processing (CEP) for Earlier
and Better Insight
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Agenda

• 1. Four Ways To Process Events
• 1.1. Event passing
• 1.2. Basic event mediation
• 1.3. Complex-Event Processing (CEP)
• 1.4. Combinations (e.g., events with BPM)
• Commercial Adoption of Event Processing
• 2.1. Market drivers is there a killer
  application?
• 2.2 Market inhibitors why hasnt this
  already happened?
• 2.3 Industry standards critical to
  expanding the market

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Event Passing in Event-Driven Applications

• Asynchronous staged business processes may be
  called
• Event-driven,
• Message-driven or
• Document-driven

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Characteristics of Simple Event-Driven
Applications

• Event handler (sink) is triggered by the arrival
  of one event in one event stream
• No real pattern matching the rule always
  evaluates to true (i.e., begin execution upon
  arrival of any one well formed message in the
  event stream)
• Benefit is experienced mostly in the IT
  department
• Benefit comes through increased flexibility of
  software engineering. The absence of control
  coupling (source and sink are not interdependent)
  makes it easy to add new sinks, move a sink, or
  even eliminate a sink, all without touching the
  event source (of course, the source and sink must
  still share a common understanding of the event
  semantics)
• Relevant middleware here is usually some form of
  MOM
• Event messages usually dont carry any genetic
  information that would indicate causality, or if
  there is such information, it is indirect
  (inserted by the application as a data element in
  the payload rather than deliberately planned and
  inserted on the header by an event processing
  agent (EPA) or manager)
• These events are raw (original), they are not
  explicitly synthesized directly from other
  events, although an application might generate an
  event which is seen as raw (original) but which
  actually reflects the significance of some other
  event(s) which were also seen as raw

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The Popular, Modern (Loose) Definition of SOA
May Encompass EDA

• If SOA means a modular, distributable,
  loosely-coupled, sharable application, then EDA
  is a type of SOA (because EDA sources and sinks
  are also modular, distributable, sharable,
  encapsulated and uncoupled)
• But if SOA means that one module provides a
  service to another (consumer) module, then EDA is
  not a type of SOA
• A service is the performance of duties or
  responsibilities for the benefit of others, but
  an event sink does not provide a service to a
  consumer module
• An SOA consumer delegates work to a subprocedure
  (the service provider), in contrast to an event
  source which does not delegate work or pass
  control
• Be careful of the word consumer. In EDA, an
  event sink is said to be the consumer (of the
  event), while in SOA, the service consumer
  initiates the relationship and consumes a
  function supported by the service provider
• The IT industry has acronym fatigue and hype
  fatigue, so wider adoption of EDA may be slow for
  another 5 years unless it is seen as wave 2 of
  SOA

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Real Applications Leverage Both EDA and
Request/reply SOA Relationships
Order Entry
Manufacturing
Shipping
Source
Event
Sink (event handler)
Request/reply SOA within an application
Sales Admin

• Use EDA when
• Application stages should run even when another
  adjacent stage is not running.
• There will be a need to frequently add, drop or
  modify processing stages without affecting any
  previous or subsequent stage.
• Multiple stages may execute simultaneously.
• Two or more sinks (stages) need the same input
  event data.

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Business Events Are Used in Four Ways 2.
Mediated Events
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Characteristics of Basic Event Mediation

• One event stream goes into a broker/mediator, one
  or more streams come out (message splitting but
  not message combining). Broker/mediator is
  stateless it acts on each input event separately
  (it has temporary state only while it is
  operating and it does not retain state after it
  has acted upon an incoming event)
• Filtering, content-based routing, and
  transformation (conditioning, or enrichment)
  may be performed by the intermediary
• Benefits directly accrue to IT people, indirectly
  to business end users
• The main benefit is insulating source and sink
  applications, effectively offloading application
  integration work from end point applications
• The relevant technology generally includes MOM
  and an integration broker
• Events sent out by the mediator generally lack
  explicit causality information

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Business Events Are Used in Four Ways3.
Complex-Event Processing
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Characteristics of CEP

• Two or more events come in from one or more event
  streams
• Pattern detection requires rules, usually
  involving sophisticated algorithms
• Non-IT people often see direct benefits through a
  BAM dashboard or similar mechanism - the most
  common benefit is business insight rather than
  faster and easier software engineering of a
  business application
• The relevant technology generally includes MOM
  and a stateful event-processing agent (EPA) or
  other event manager (custom 3GL coding would be
  onerous in many CEP situations)
• Complex events are often consciously synthesized
  from simple events, and genetic information is
  sometimes inserted into the events
• BPM is not required for CEP
• A business process model is not required for CEP
• But BPM may use BAM and CEP for monitoring of
  business processes

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CEP and BAM - ManipulatingMultiple Event Streams
1. Capture simple events (e.g., adapters)
BAM Tool
2. Transport events (e.g., MOM)
Subprocess
SOA Service
3. Apply EPL rules filter, correlate, apply
constraints, aggregate, update event logs
4. Notify people, trigger BPM processes or
invokeapplications and SOA services, optionally
enriching events with context from event logs and
other databases
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The Majority of Business Activity Monitoring
(BAM) Applications Use CEP

• Goals
• Monitor key objectives
• Anticipate operational risks or incidents
• Reduce latency between material events and action
• Approach
• Update real-time dashboard
• Link to BI historical reporting and analysis
• Issue context-rich alerts
• Integrate with business process management
• Manage incident life cycles

Orders processed
Manufacturing defects
Web channel volume
IT capacity
Supply chain status
Support call times
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Business Events Are Used in Four Ways4.
Combinations
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Characteristics of BPM-enabled Events

• One or more event streams are presented to a
  stateful BPM engine/mediator, one or more streams
  are generated as output (message splitting and
  message combining) or one or more services are
  invoked
• Filtering, content-based routing, and
  transformation may be performed by the
  intermediary, but more importantly, the flow of
  control is governed by a state-aware BPM type
  mechanism that has a pre-specified model of the
  business process
• Benefits mostly business end users
• Benefits include making the process flow
  explicit, making the process flows easier to
  change and making it possible to monitor the
  integrity of a multistep process through multiple
  stages in its life cycle
• The relevant technology includes MOM and a
  purpose-built stateful BPM engine.
• Events are consciously synthesized from other
  events
• BPM almost always uses message passing for some
  aspects of processing
• BPM may also use event mediation and CEP for
  monitoring of business processes

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Business Process Management Tools Use Events to
Trigger Activities and to Track Status
Order Entry
Shipping
Notify BPM engine that activity has completed
Billing
Invoke a SOA Service
Trigger an EDA event handler
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Adoption of EDA Application Types in Business
Applications
100
Theoretical Usefulness
80
Actual Usage, 2005
Percentage Penetration in New, Large-Scale
Application Systems
60
40
20
0
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Agenda

• 1. Four Ways To Process Events
• 1.1. Event passing
• 1.2. Basic event mediation
• 1.3. Complex-Event Processing (CEP)
• 1.4. Combinations (e.g., events with BPM)
• Commercial Adoption of Event Processing
• 2.1. Market drivers is there a killer
  application?
• 2.2 Market inhibitors why hasnt this
  already happened?
• 2.3 Industry standards critical to
  expanding the market

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Market Drivers

• 1. Business strategies are enhanced by EDA. The
  real world is mostly event driven, and
  event-driven situations are best addressed by
  event-driven business applications (to eliminate
  the impedance mismatch)
• 2. Pressures for sense-and-respond behavior, fast
  action, prediction-based actions and agility are
  growing because of globalization, compliance
  demands and other forces (zero-latency
  enterprise, real-time enterprise and similar
  goals)
• 3. SOA is teaching developers about business
  components and will make event-capable middleware
  (ESBs) commonplace
• 4. Vendors are developing better event processing
  software tools
• 5. Event-oriented standards are expanding,
  especially within Web services and Java
• 6. Ongoing improvements in CPU and network
  price/performance and scalability
• 7. Candidate killer applications Trading,
  defense, BAM, RFID, CRM, fraud detection,
  security, SCM, compliance

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Market Inhibitors Why this has not happened
already

1. Gaps in software development methodologies even
   for simple staged event-passing EDA
2. Mainstream business application developers lack
   knowledge of event-capable tools MOM,
   integration suites, BPM, CEP and BAM
3. Business analysts do not understand EDA (design
   issues, technology or applicability), and EDA
   specialists dont understand the business
   situations that could use EDA. Potential projects
   are not even identified (lack of ROI information
   is not the real problem)
4. The lack of standards breeds fear of high costs,
   lock-in and failure

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New Analysis and Design Approaches for SOA and
EDA Are Emerging
1998-2008

• Most current work on developing SOA analysis and
  design methodologies still fails to make events
  first class citizens

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Standards Relevant to Events (I)

• Simple events
• WS- RX, WS- Reliable Messaging and WS-Reliability
• WS- Addressing
• WS- Eventing, WS- Notification getting back on
  track
• WSDL v.2 is better than WSDL v.1 for EDA (MEP
  concept)
• Java Message Service (JMS)
• Message-Driven Beans (MDB)
• Mediated events
• XSLT, XPath, XQuery, JBI, SCA/SDO
• BPM events
• BPEL, BPMN

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Standards Relevant to Events (II)

• BAM/CEP Standards
• Common Business Event (CBE) schema first pass
  was pre-WS-Notification, is now seen as a part of
  the Oasis WSDM (Web services Distributed
  Management) event framework but it must be
  extended to handle business events
• Event Processing Language (EPL) No proposals
  currently on the table
• Need standard APIs for handling events, event
  metadata and event databases (CEI is one possible
  starting point)
• JAIN (Java for Advanced Intelligent Networks)
• Includes SIP
• SLEE (Service Logic Execution Environment)

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Recommendations for User Companies

• Use EDA on the business process and application
  architecture levels.
• Design all new enterprise-class applicationsas
  sets of assignable modules, rather thanwith
  monolithic architectures.
• Use request/response SOA and the simpler forms of
  EDA in mainstream projects now.
• Use CEP in BAM applications and for leading-edge
  projects where real-time insight must be
  maximizedand you are willing to invest in
  emerging technology.

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Event Processingin Business Applications

• Roy Schulte
• 15 March 2006