Did CEP deliver for SOA and can it for Cloud?
by Mark Little, InfoQ
In 2002 David Luckham introduced the term Complex Event Processing (CEP). In papers several years later on the history of CEP, Luckham showed how although event processing has been a core part of distributed systems and simulations for decades, CEP is an evolution and not the same as, say, context switching. In fact CEP can best be summarised as:
Complex Event Processing is a technology for low-latency filtering, correlating, aggregating, and computing on real- world event data.
Over the intervening years, CEP was discussed within the context of SOA as a natural fit and at times called “a new physics of computing” or, as the “next big thing” in 2008 by WebSphere CTO Jerry Cuomo:
I’ve started to hear some people talk about this in the context of SOA, and I really believe it’s the next big thing in SOA, and that’s event processing. I don’t know how much you’re hearing about this, but certainly we’re taking it very seriously. I see a spectrum of event processing. There are types of event processing that we are doing very well today on the simpler notion of event processing.
There have been several companies offering and developing CEP products or open source projects, such as Esper, Drools Fusion, Oracle and Sybase. At the same time we saw people talking about Event Driven Architectures (EDA) and Event Stream Processing (ESP), building on the concepts of events and CEP, with the likes of Gartner and Oracle even suggesting that the combination of CEP and SOA was the genesis of the next generation of SOA, i.e., SOA 2.0, though that didn’t go down too well with the wider industry. However, as Eric Roch points out recently, often the term CEP can make it difficult to sell the underlying concepts: …….
DCL: This is something of a critique of the commercial CEP offerings on the market at the moment. I think I agree with the author. Do you?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.