AWS EventBridge
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus service that routes events between AWS services, custom applications, and third-party SaaS providers based on rules, enabling loosely coupled, event-driven architectures without applications…
Definition
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus service that routes events between AWS services, custom applications, and third-party SaaS providers based on rules, enabling loosely coupled, event-driven architectures without applications needing direct knowledge of each other.
Overview
EventBridge is built around the concept of an event bus — a pipeline that receives events (structured JSON payloads describing something that happened, such as an S3 object being created or a custom application state change) and routes them to one or more targets based on rules that match event patterns. Producers publish events to a bus without knowing who, if anyone, is listening, and consumers subscribe by defining rules that match specific event patterns, decoupling the systems that generate events from the systems that react to them. EventBridge provides several buses: the default event bus, which automatically receives events from over 200 AWS services; custom event buses for an organization's own application events; and partner event buses, which receive events directly from supported third-party SaaS providers (like Zendesk, Datadog, or Shopify) without requiring the customer to build custom webhook infrastructure. Rules use an event pattern matching syntax to filter events by source, type, or specific field values, and route matching events to any of a wide range of targets, including Lambda functions, Step Functions state machines, SQS queues, SNS topics, Kinesis streams, and more. Beyond simple pub/sub routing, EventBridge includes EventBridge Scheduler for creating one-time or recurring scheduled invocations at scale, EventBridge Pipes for point-to-point integrations with built-in filtering, enrichment, and transformation between a specific source and target, and Schema Registry, which can infer and store the structure of events flowing through a bus to generate code bindings for strongly-typed event handling. Because it decouples event producers from consumers and requires no infrastructure to manage, EventBridge is a common backbone for microservices architectures on AWS, letting teams add new event consumers without modifying the systems that produce the events, and is frequently used alongside Lambda and Step Functions to build reactive, serverless application architectures.
Key Features
- Serverless event bus routing events based on pattern-matching rules
- Default bus receives events automatically from 200+ AWS services
- Custom buses for application-specific events; partner buses for SaaS integrations
- Routes events to Lambda, Step Functions, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, and more
- EventBridge Scheduler for one-time and recurring scheduled invocations
- EventBridge Pipes for point-to-point integration with filtering and enrichment
- Schema Registry can infer event structure and generate code bindings
- Decouples event producers from consumers for loosely coupled architectures