Introducing The Event Destinations Initiative

The Event Destinations Initiative is a community effort aimed at creating a model for event interoperability between event producers and their consumers. This initiative focuses on providing a set of guidelines for managing event destinations, ensuring seamless integration, improved reliability, greater event delivery choice, and a much-improved developer experience.

What are Event Destinations?

Event Destinations are the endpoints where API platform events are delivered and consumed. Event destinations can include webhook endpoints, message queues, APIs, event gateways, and other services that handle event data. Webhooks are the most ubiquitous form of event destination, but the Event Destinations Initiative aims to establish a set of guidelines for API platforms to provide additional event delivery options offering more choice, improved reliability at scale, and an overall better developer experience.

What is the Event Destinations Initiative?

The Event Destinations Initiative is a collaborative project that aims to create a set of guidelines for defining, managing, and utilizing event destinations across platforms and services.

Key Features

• Standardization: Establishing a common set of guidelines and best practices for event destinations.
• Interoperability: Ensuring compatibility across different platforms and services.
• Scalability: Providing solutions that can scale with the growing demands of modern applications.
• Reliability: Enhancing the reliability and fault tolerance of event-driven architectures.

Benefits

• Simplified Integration: Easier integration with commonly used services and platforms.
• Improved Efficiency: Streamlined event publishing, routing, and ingestion.
• Enhanced Reliability: More robust and fault-tolerant event handling for both the publisher and consumer.
• Future-Proofing: A forward-looking approach that anticipates future needs and challenges.

What Supporters are Saying

In his book Flow Architectures, James Urquhart envisions a future where APIs are inherently asynchronous, with synchronous APIs being reserved only for scenarios where they are truly necessary.

The Event Destinations Initiative represents a significant step toward realizing that vision. Enabling API producers to adopt the most efficient and performant methods for sending and receiving asynchronous, non-blocking data is a development I wholeheartedly support—particularly when it is driven by a collaborative and open effort.

This direction strongly aligns with the vision we champion at AsyncAPI, and the synergy between these efforts is both promising and exciting. I am eager to see the Event Destinations Initiative succeed and contribute to the evolution and blending of API and EDA ecosystems.

-- Fran Méndez, Founder @ AsyncAPI Initiative

I've been working with (and often against) webhooks for years, both as a consumer and an implementer, always wishing that we as an industry could come up with something better. In my opinion, Event Destinations are exactly that.

-- Paul Asjes, Developer Experience Engineer @ ElevenLabs

Get Involved

We invite developers, architects, and organizations to join us in this initiative. By collaborating, we can build a more efficient and reliable event-driven ecosystem.

Visit eventdestinations.org to learn more and get involved.