In today's fast-paced business environment, companies need to react quickly to changes in the market. Event-driven architecture (EDA) is a software design pattern, enabling applications to respond to real-time events and data streams. Thus, being an ideal architecture for building systems that can react quickly to changes in the market. One of the key challenges of creating and consuming EDAs is understanding how they work. SwaggerHub Explore can play a crucial role in achieving this.
API Exploration Using Kafka
API exploration is the process of discovering and interacting with APIs and services to get familiar and understand how they work to effectively integrate with said systems. This process can involve interacting with various APIs, experimenting with different data sources, and testing or simulating different event triggers. This can be a time-consuming and complex process, especially in large-scale systems. SwaggerHub Explore can simplify this process by providing an easy way to interact with Kafka topics and/or simulate the events to get a feel for that end-to-end interaction.
Using Kafka, developers can create data streams from these APIs and subscribe to those streams to see how they behave. They can test different event triggers, such as new order received, payment received, and order shipped, and see how they affect the overall system. Once developers have identified the APIs and data sources that trigger events, they can use Kafka to build a centralized event hub that can receive events from various sources and trigger actions in the system.
Developers can use Kafka to create data streams from various APIs and data sources, and then subscribe to those streams to get data based on an event being triggered. This approach can help developers process and analyze data streams in real-time, making it ideal for building real-time data processing applications. For example, consider a system that processes orders from an e-commerce website. This means it is mission critical and revenue impacting to build a reliable and highly optimized throughput that can handle thousands of potential messages. An EDA would be ideal for this business case.
SwaggerHub Explore For All Your Kafka Exploration Needs
Meet SwaggerHub Explore! SwaggerHub Explore is our new API exploration tool that gives you visibility into your RESTful and Kafka Services. Understanding an API within a workflow can be a tedious and extensive process. SwaggerHub Explore enables users to analyze the data received from an API request, or by subscribing to a Kafka topic, to easily evaluate the value in one place.
Get more out of your workflow when you:
- Learn the functionality of existing endpoints to discover the capabilities and limitations of an API
- Save time by identifying APIs that fit your development requirements to integrate faster
- Store APIs in your space and search history to use later rather than start from scratch
For more information on how to explore your Kafka APIs, check out our on-demand webinar, Scale. Update. Deploy: Boost Collaboration in Event-Driven Architecture with Development and QA Teams. Our resident API experts, Josh Ponelat and Frank Killcommins, dive deeper and walk you through a Kafka workflow from beginning to end using our API Lifecycle solutions.
Oh, by the way, SwaggerHub Explore is a free tool. Create your free account and get exploring today!