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- What is AWS EventBridge: Process, Benefits and Use Cases
What is AWS EventBridge: Process, Benefits and Use Cases
Have you ever wanted to connect multiple applications or services together but needed help with the complexity of doing so? That’s where AWS EventBridge comes in! It’s a serverless event bus service that makes connecting applications and services using events easy. Let’s try learning about AWS EventBridge and how it can simplify your event-driven architecture.
In this blog post, we will cover the basics of Eventbridge, the benefits it provides, and real-world use cases. Let’s dive in!
What is Event-Driven Architecture?
Event-driven architecture is a software design pattern where systems are built around the production, detection, and reaction to events. Instead of direct calls between components, one component emits an event when something happens, and other components listen for and respond to those events. This creates loose coupling, improves scalability, and allows for asynchronous communication across distributed systems. It’s especially useful for building responsive, resilient systems where components can evolve independently.
What is AWS EventBridge?
AWS EventBridge is a serverless event-bus service that enables businesses to quickly and easily integrate applications, services, and data across multiple cloud environments. It is a fully managed service that provides a reliable, scalable, and secure way to process and route events between applications and services. EventBridge allows businesses to quickly and easily create, update, and delete event-driven architectures with the click of a mouse. Businesses can use EventBridge to create event-driven architectures without having to write code.
It provides a central place to manage your event data and eliminates the need to write custom event management code, making it easier to build event-driven applications. EventBridge supports a wide variety of data sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). With EventBridge, businesses can quickly process and route events from any source to any destination.
AWS EventBridge Pricing
EventBridge pricing is based primarily on the number of events published or ingested, along with optional charges for features like schema registry and cross-account event buses.
Here’s the breakdown:
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Event Ingestion and Delivery: You’re charged per million events published to your event bus. As of this writing, the cost is $1.00 per million events for the first 100 million events per month on the default bus. This includes routing and delivery to one or more targets.
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Custom Event Buses: Custom buses have the same per-event pricing as the default bus, but are useful for logically separating events across teams or applications.
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Schema Registry (optional): If you use the schema discovery feature, you’ll pay based on the number of discovered events and schema storage. This feature helps developers understand event structure automatically.
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Cross-Region and Cross-Account Delivery: These advanced use cases may incur additional data transfer costs depending on your setup.
Example: If your system emits 5 million events per month, and each is routed to one Lambda function, you’d pay about $5/month for EventBridge itself—plus any costs for the targets (like Lambda invocations).
Tip: Use filters to minimize unnecessary event delivery and reduce costs, especially when routing to multiple targets.
When to Use AWS EventBridge
AWS EventBridge is ideal for building loosely coupled, event-driven systems that respond to changes in real time. It excels when you need to connect AWS services, third-party SaaS applications, or custom applications without writing and maintaining complex integration code.
Here are some practical scenarios where EventBridge is a strong fit:
| Amazon EventBridge Use Cases | Why EventBridge Works Well |
|---|---|
| Microservices Communication | Decouples services by letting them emit and respond to events without direct dependencies. |
| Automated Infrastructure Responses | React to AWS service events (e.g., EC2 instance failure) by triggering remediation workflows. |
| SaaS Integration | Ingest events from partners like Datadog, Okta, or Zendesk with native SaaS connectors. |
| Data Pipeline Triggers | Kick off ETL jobs or Lambda functions when new data lands in S3 or databases are updated. |
| Security & Compliance Monitoring | Route security events (e.g., from AWS Config or GuardDuty) to alerting or remediation tools. |
| Cross-Account Event Routing | Share events across AWS accounts for centralized monitoring or governance. |
Benefits of AWS EventBridge
AWS EventBridge provides a host of benefits to businesses looking to build event-driven architectures. These benefits include:
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- Easy Connectivity: EventBridge simplifies the process of connecting different applications and services, enabling seamless communication and data transfer.
- Serverless: EventBridge is a serverless service, so you don’t have to worry about managing any infrastructure. This means you can focus on building your application and let EventBridge handle the underlying infrastructure.
- Cross-Account and Cross-Region Capabilities: EventBridge enables you to transfer events between different AWS accounts and regions, allowing for greater flexibility and scalability.
- Cost-Effective: With EventBridge, you only pay for what you use. There are no upfront costs or long-term commitments, making it a cost-effective solution for event-driven architecture.
- Multiple Target Options: EventBridge supports a variety of targets, including AWS Lambda functions, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon Kinesis streams, and Amazon Step Functions state machines, allowing you to route events to the right place for processing.
- Centralised Management: EventBridge provides a central place to manage your event data, making tracking and monitoring your events more accessible.
- SaaS Integration: EventBridge also integrates with various SaaS applications, making it easier to transfer events between them and your own applications or services.
AWS Cloud Cost Allocation: The Complete Guide
Amazon EventBridge Key Features
EventBridge offers a rich set of features to build and operate scalable event-driven applications across AWS and third-party systems. Here are the key components:
EventBridge
The Event Bus is the core of EventBridge. It receives events from AWS services, custom applications, or SaaS providers and routes them to the right targets based on defined rules. You can use the default bus, create custom buses for specific domains, or receive events from other AWS accounts.
Pipes
EventBridge Pipes simplify integration between event sources and targets by providing built-in filtering, transformation, and enrichment capabilities. They reduce the need for custom code when moving data from services like SQS or Kinesis to Lambda, Step Functions, or other targets.
Schedulers
The Scheduler feature allows you to trigger actions at specific times or intervals—down to the second. It’s ideal for scheduled jobs, delayed events, or time-based workflows, without needing a separate cron service.
Schema Registry
The Schema Registry captures and stores the structure of events (schemas) as they flow through EventBridge. This helps developers understand event payloads, auto-generate code bindings, and improve validation for event consumers.
Replays
Replays let you reprocess past events by replaying them through your EventBridge rules. This is useful for recovering from downstream failures, testing changes, or backfilling systems without modifying producers.
How Does Amazon EventBridge Work?
EventBridge connects event producers to consumers using a flexible routing layer, enabling real-time, event-driven applications. Here’s how the process works step by step:
1. An Event is Generated
An AWS service (like S3, EC2, or CloudWatch), a SaaS provider, or a custom application emits an event. The event is a JSON payload describing something that happened—such as a file being uploaded or an instance changing state.
2. The Event is Sent to an Event Bus
The event is delivered to an EventBridge event bus—either the default bus, a custom bus, or a partner bus, depending on the source.
3. Rules are Evaluated
EventBridge checks all associated rules on that bus. Rules contain filtering logic to determine whether an event should be routed to one or more targets based on event content.
4. Targets are Invoked
For matching rules, EventBridge sends the event to the specified target(s)—such as AWS Lambda, Step Functions, SNS, SQS, or even another event bus.
5. Optional Transformations or Enrichments
If using EventBridge Pipes, the event can be filtered, transformed, or enriched (e.g., via Lambda or API calls) before reaching the final target.
6. The Target Performs an Action
The receiving service processes the event—triggering workflows, storing data, sending alerts, or initiating any defined logic.
Other Alternatives to Amazon EventBridge
While Amazon EventBridge is a powerful event routing service within the AWS ecosystem, there are several alternatives depending on your cloud provider or integration needs:
| Service | Provider | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Azure Event Grid | Microsoft Azure | Routes events from Azure services and custom sources to Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and more. |
| Google Eventarc | Google Cloud | Serverless eventing to route Google Cloud and custom events to Cloud Run and other targets. |
| Confluent Kafka | Confluent / OSS | Managed Apache Kafka service for real-time, high-throughput event streaming and processing. |
| TriggerMesh | Open Source | Event integration platform for multicloud and hybrid architectures with broad connectivity. |
Getting started with AWS EventBridge
By following these steps, you can get started with AWS EventBridge and begin building event-driven architecture that is scalable, flexible, and cost-effective:
- Create an AWS Account: If you don’t already have an AWS account, you’ll need to create one. This is a simple process that involves providing some basic information and choosing a payment method.
- Set up an EventBus: An EventBus is a central hub in EventBridge where events are sent. You can either create a default EventBus or a custom EventBus.
- Define event sources: Event sources are the entities that produce events. You can define event sources in EventBridge using AWS resources such as S3, Lambda, EC2, or custom applications.
- Route events to targets: Once you have defined event sources, you must route events to targets. A target is where events are sent for processing. You can choose from various targets, including AWS Lambda functions, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon Kinesis streams, and Amazon Step Functions state machines.
- Implement event consumers: Event consumers are the applications or services that consume events from EventBridge. You can implement event consumers using a variety of programming languages, including Java, Python, and Node.js.
- Test and debug: Once you have set up EventBridge, you can test and debug your event-driven architecture. You can use AWS Management Console to monitor events and identify any issues.
- Monitor and optimize: Finally, you can monitor and optimize your event-driven architecture to ensure it runs efficiently and effectively. You can use metrics and alarms to monitor the performance of your architecture and make changes as needed to improve performance and reduce costs.
However, the process described above can be a complex task involving much manual effort. And as the number of events increases, it gets harder to work on the process. This is where nOps can help.
How can nOps EventBridge Integration help you?
If you’re looking to save on your AWS EventBridge and other AWS costs, nOps makes it easy for engineers to take action on cloud cost optimization.
The nOps all-in-one cloud platform features include:
- Cloud Visibility: Reports, dashboards, cost allocation, forecasting, budgets, alerts & more with one-click integrations for AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, GenAI and SaaS
- Compute Optimization: Optimize every level of your compute, from the container level all the way to pricing
- Commitment management: Use 100% of your commitments with a risk-free guarantee
- Resource cleanup: One-click rightsizing, storage optimization, scheduling & more
nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $2+ billion in cloud spend for our customers.
Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!
Frequently Asked Questions
When should AWS EventBridge be used?
Use AWS EventBridge when you need to build event-driven applications that integrate AWS services, SaaS platforms, or custom apps without managing infrastructure. It’s ideal for decoupling components, orchestrating workflows, or reacting to real-time changes—like triggering a Lambda when an S3 object is created. EventBridge is also great for auditing and compliance workflows, integrating third-party apps, or routing events across accounts. Choose EventBridge when scalability, flexibility, and low-latency event routing are essential for your architecture.
How much does AWS EventBridge cost?
AWS EventBridge pricing is based on the number of events published, matched, and delivered. The first 100,000 events per month are free. Beyond that, you’re billed per million events, with different rates depending on whether they come from AWS services, custom apps, or partner integrations. Additional charges apply for schema discovery and event bus archive or replay features. Since it’s serverless, there are no provisioning costs. Always refer to the EventBridge pricing page for the latest details.
How to use AWS EventBridge?
To use AWS EventBridge, start by choosing an event bus: the default AWS event bus, a custom one, or a partner bus. Create rules to filter incoming events and route them to targets like Lambda, Step Functions, SNS, SQS, or API destinations. You can define these using the AWS Console, CLI, SDKs, or Infrastructure as Code tools like CloudFormation. EventBridge automatically handles event ingestion, filtering, and delivery, making it a powerful tool for building loosely coupled, event-driven systems.
How fast is AWS EventBridge?
AWS EventBridge is designed for low-latency, high-throughput event processing. Most events are delivered within half a second, and AWS reports 99.999% reliability for event delivery. It supports millions of events per second across accounts and regions, making it suitable for near-real-time architectures. While not as fast as raw messaging systems like Kinesis or Kafka, EventBridge excels in serverless, decoupled systems where simplicity, flexibility, and managed scaling matter more than microsecond-level latency. It’s fast enough for most real-world use cases.
