Introduction to VAST Event Broker

Introduction to VAST Event Broker#

VAST Event Broker is a modern, high-performance event streaming platform designed as a powerful alternative to Apache Kafka. It provides a Kafka-compatible API and is built on the revolutionary VAST Data Platform. By re-architecting the underlying system, the Event Broker overcomes the traditional limitations of Kafka, delivering major improvements in performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency for real-time data pipelines and AI applications.

At its core, VAST Event Broker uses a disaggregated and shared-everything (DASE) architecture. Unlike Kafka, which combines compute and storage on broker nodes, VAST separates these layers. This allows you to scale compute and storage resources independently, eliminating bottlenecks and simplifying cluster management.

Key Features of VAST Event Broker#

  • Kafka-Compatible API: Presents a compatible Kafka API, allowing most existing producers, consumers, and applications using the Kafka protocol to connect with minimal to no changes. This eases migration and allows teams to leverage the VAST platform’s benefits without a complete application rewrite.

  • Enhanced Performance: Runs on an all-flash data platform, dramatically reducing latency and accelerating metadata operations for faster, more responsive real-time analytics.

  • Simplified Management: The underlying VAST platform automates complex tasks like data placement, protection, partition rebalancing, and data tiering, freeing up engineering resources.

  • Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Combines independent scaling with industry-leading data reduction to provide a more cost-effective solution for storing and processing massive event streams with an effectively infinite retention window.

  • Seamless Database Integration: By using VAST DB as its persistence layer, the Event Broker creates a direct pathway from an event stream to a queryable database table. This unique integration allows you to run SQL queries directly on your streaming data using engines like Trino.

Use Cases for VAST Event Broker#

  • 📊 Real-time Analytics: Stream event logs from applications and infrastructure for immediate processing in use cases like fraud detection, personalized customer support, and inventory optimization.

  • 📡 IoT Data: Ingest and process high-volume device telemetry data in real time for fleet management, warehouse sensor tracking, and logistics.

  • 🤖 AI Pipelines: Feed live data streams directly into machine learning models for real-time training and inference, enabling applications like anomaly detection and predictive analytics.

  • 🔔 Notification Systems: Power event-driven user updates, such as in-app notifications and order status alerts, with high throughput and low latency.

Contents