Just about 22 hours ago, AWS informed that EventBridge is now capable of delivering events directly to cross-accounts targets, like Lambda, SQS or SNS.
Ok, cool. What’s all the hype about? Let me explain.
Simplified architecture
So far, in order to deliver a an event – cross-account – to an AWS service, you needed an event bus in the receiver account. Hopefully you’re deploying your infrastructure with CDK/CloudFormation/Terraform and you understand that would be an additional resource to be managed. On top of that, you also need a rule that captures incoming events and redirects them to the actual targets – yet another resource. Let’s not forget about permissions – you have to allow sender’s event bus to publish events into receiver’s event bus. This means you not only have to create and deploy these resources, but also manage them and adjust over time in case something changes (like event pattern). One may say it’s not such a big deal, but who likes changing these things, begging others to accept PRs and waiting for pipelines?
What if I told you, you can get rid of all these things? As of yesterday, receiver does not need an event bus at all, so you can directly deliver an event to another account’s service, like SQS queue, bypassing their EventBridge completely. No event bus on receiver side = less work, less management, profit. All you need to do is:
grant IAM permissions to provide access to the queue.
Which, of course, can be done on resource-based policy level. You still need a rule and proper execution role attached on sender’s account side, but see all the complexity on receiver’s side going up in smoke!
Reduced latency
Removing receiver’s event bus from the event’s path means we effectively reduce latency. The fewer components processing an event, the faster it gets delivered. Simple as that.
Conclusion
Is this revolutionary? No. Is there anything to be hyped about? Not really. Is it a small change that can make developers’ lives easier, might contribute to decreased latency and cost? Absolutely. This is just a small step in good direction.
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