TriggerMesh Makes Integration Platform Open Source

TriggerMesh this week at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conference revealed it is making the TriggerMesh Integration Platform based on Kubernetes available under an open source Apache Software License 2.0.

Mark Hinkle, TriggerMesh CEO, says as other open source initiatives have shown, the number of organizations that are likely to adopt TriggerMesh Integration Platform increases when developers within organizations can download it without requiring approval from a purchasing organization.

The TriggerMesh platform provides access to a cloud bus to facilitate application flow orchestration and the consumption of events emanating from any data center application or cloud source. It is designed to trigger serverless functions using a declarative application programming interface (API) and a set of tools for defining event flows and functions.

Designed to foster a shift toward an integration-as-code approach enabling event-driven workflows, TriggerMesh is also promoting adoption of a TriggerMesh Integration Language (TIL) that makes it simpler to create and maintain integrations in Kubernetes environments by eliminating the need to rely on YAML files. Instead, TIL provides access to a higher-level declarative language that provides an abstraction of Kubernetes objects using the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) that is employed to provision infrastructure-as-code (IaC).

The platform itself is built on open source Knative middleware running on Kubernetes clusters that has been extended by TriggerMesh to add support for proprietary serverless computing frameworks such as Lambda from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Most recently, TriggerMesh received an undisclosed amount of investment from Cisco after raising an additional $5 million in funding earlier this year. The company is now focused on providing enterprise support alongside additional extensions to the core TriggerMesh Integration Platform.

That platform is designed to enable organizations to shift toward event-driven IT architectures that are at the core of many digital business transformation initiatives. As data is increasingly processed and analyzed at the edge, there is a need to update backend systems in near-real-time versus continuing to rely on batch updates that might only occur once a day. End users now expect the data being accessed via a digital business process to be as current as possible.

Event-driven architectures, of course, are not a new idea but with the rise of serverless computing frameworks they are becoming a lot simpler to invoke. They are often invoked via a cloud service without requiring an internal IT operations team to deploy and maintain a middleware platform. None of this means that traditional batch-oriented applications are going away any time soon, but it does mean the overall IT environment will become more diverse as more event-driven platforms are deployed.

In the meantime, IT teams will need to decide whether to require a new approach to integration as part of that transition versus waiting for providers of legacy integration platforms to better support modern cloud-native applications.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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