In my previous article, I demonstrated how you can leverage the upcoming v0.7 release of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) to publish and consume custom events to easily extend your event-driven automation to other event sources. As a recap, this is accomplished by constructing and sending a conformant CloudEvent to VEBA, which can then be consumed by your functions.
This is perfect for external event sources that can create a custom HTTP payload that conforms to the CloudEvent specification, however not all solutions have this type of functionality or flexibility. An alternative solution to this is to simply create a VEBA function that can accept a custom payload and then handle the transformation of the data into a valid CloudEvent and then forward that off to broker running within VEBA. This is just one of the many benefits of Knative, the backend for VEBA, where each function deployment includes an endpoint that is automatically served as a subdomain to the VEBA hostname (e.g. https://my-function.NAMESPACE.VEBA-FQDN)
This solution would enable external "Event Producer" to send a non-CloudEvent payload which can then be processed by your function and re-publish as a conformant CloudEvent that can then be consumed by other function and services.
- Event Provider would make HTTP request to the function webhook with a custom payload
- A conformant CloudEvent payload is constructed by the webhook function
- Webhook function will then forward the CloudEvent internally to the VMware Event Broker Appliance
- VEBA functions can now react to these custom CloudEvents
