Introduction to ArenaCore Platform Integration

The ArenaCore Platform is a multi-vendor, multi-technology environment that manages detailed solution design information in an event driven fashion.

Clearly, it would be advantageous to push knowledge of new design changes into relevant associated configuration and monitoring management platforms. Doing this this would support full automation of design changes through to the instantiation, modification and tear-down of associated real-world object items (which could include virtual machines, containers, API relationships, network structures and physical configuration information).

Rather than attempt to provide built-in integrations to the many management platforms that could potentially be needed, ArenaCore has instead been designed to support a common integration pattern against which any number of integration implementations can ultimately be built and used without change to the core ArenaCore environment.

This integration approach is built around the same internal event architecture that ArenaCore uses itself, meaning that add, change or remove events are provided to integrated platforms such that they can update their own configuration representation to exactly match that of ArenaCore.

ArenaCore events are pushed outwards from ArenaCore across the Kafka messaging bus. This means that client adapters can be written in any language that supports a Kafka client. Initially, a Java based client is available for utilisation and extension. It is anticipated that additional languages will become supported over time including Javascript/Typescript, Go, Python and .Net (languages) etc. Messaging client implementations can be hosted in the cloud, on customer premises or ‘invisibly’ within ArenaCore managed infrastructure, as is appropriate or needed.

Before events can be relayed over the Kafka messaging bus it is necessary to define which classes of resources should be moved towards which external management platforms. This involves describing which resources sitting at what locations in the customer directory structure should be managed over which specific Kafka topic channels. A capability has been incorporated into the ArenaCore Directory Manager (within the ArenaCore Administration Application) that enables the creation of new topics and association of filtering rules against them. This is described further in the following pages.