PegaSys Plus, launched October 22, is our commercially-licensed Ethereum platform designed for enterprises that want to accelerate their blockchain solution to production quickly. In the previous posts in this series, we've talked about PegaSys Plus' increased security features using blockchain database encryption and how PegaSys Plus ensures uptime with advanced monitoring. In this post, Product Manager Tim Beiko dives into another one of PegaSys Plus’ enterprise-focused features - event streaming to Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis.

If you are running a production application on Ethereum, you will likely be subscribing to various events on the blockchain in order to monitor what’s happening. Whether that’s checking for a new block, validating that a transaction made it in the transaction pool, or simply monitoring whether your nodes are synced to the network, updating your application to reflect the latest network state is critical.



While this functionality is available on Hyperledger Besu via our websockets API, enterprise users often require something more reliable, that can work at scale without ever dropping a message. PegaSys Plus now offers a solution for this: event streaming to Kafka and Kinesis.

Why Event Streaming Matters for your Enterprise

Enterprises have a large number of data creating systems that need to talk to one another. When running a blockchain application, almost all of them need to be aware of what is happening on-chain. Rather than connecting each of these systems to your blockchain client directly, event streaming allows you to direct filtered data from the blockchain to your various systems so that they each get exactly the information they need.

Event streaming is a fault-tolerant solution, which can scale to provide high availability during traffic spikes all while making it easier to manage concurrency and transaction ordering in real-time. It also enables a more decoupled architecture for your application, removing dependencies.



How Event Streaming Works in PegaSys Plus

With PegaSys Plus, application developers can subscribe to any websocket-based events and scale using Kafka or Kinesis. What does that mean? A more stable stream, without requiring websocket subscriptions, that is scalable and reliable. With event streaming, you’re able to set alerts or functionality triggers for events, such as new blocks, sync progress, logs, etc with ease. Transactions can be monitored as they arrive on the network, get included in blocks, get dropped and more.

Users can simplify the tooling around your client that ensures that no messages get lost in the case of a node going down, that manage connecting to multiple nodes, or that deal with mobile users on spotty or changing networks.

Simply configure the plugin and you’ll be able to receive new block headers, updates from your transaction pool or your node’s syncing progress, directly via your message broker.

Interested in learning more about how event streaming can work for your enterprise? Reach out to us here.

