Foundational CEP

Organizations are rapidly increasing their use of event processing as a way to make their systems smarter, more real-time, and easier to maintain. Popular messaging systems, such as Kafka, provide the basic plumbing for moving event data but real-time applications also need the capability to process that data effectively – which is where CEP comes in. CEP, sometimes in conjunction with AI techniques, is the basis for stream analytics, situation awareness, sense-and-respond systems, and more intelligent transactional applications.

The following documents provide the basic background that explains what CEP is and how it works:

1. Introduction To Real-Time Intelligence
   This article defines real-time intelligence, describes real-time data and where it originates, and explains the role of CEP in processing and analyzing real-time data.
   
   
2. Event Processing Glossary – Version 2.0
   The glossary provides definitions for the terms used in CEP. The glossary was developed by the now-defunct Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) but the concepts are fundamental and perennial.
   
   
3. What’s the Difference Between ESP and CEP?
   Some kinds of CEP are more sophisticated than others, although being more sophisticated doesn’t make them better for simple problems. This article explores the CEP spectrum from event stream processing (ESP) systems that handle relatively simple calculations for vertical causality on single streams to more-sophisticated CEP approaches that detect patterns with horizontal causality in event clouds that have multiple kinds of events, often with partial ordering and out-of-order events. It also provides a history of the early development of CEP at Stanford University between 1989 and 1995 to analyze event-driven simulations of distributed system architectures.
   
   
4. The Future of Event Stream Processing Analytics and CEP
   This article further describes the growing overlap of ESP and CEP, and outlines some of the trends occurring in the event processing market.
   
   
5. Vendors and Products in the Event Stream Processing Market
   This is a brief summary of the major vendors and products currently operating in the commercial and open-source event stream processing (ESP) platform market.
   
   
6. The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems by David Luckham
   This book is truly the foundation of CEP. It starts with a high-level discussion of the role of CEP in IT ecosystems, and then provides a detailed, scholarly explanation of CEP, including the Rapide event pattern language, reactive event pattern rules, event pattern constraints, and event processing agents.