Integrating with Apache Kafka

Overview

Event-driven architectures are a popular choice for organizations looking to scale up their business, improve their responsiveness, and meet their process efficiency goals. To help with this journey, Appian supports integrating with your enterprise's Kafka systems. You can consume events from a Kafka topic to write records or trigger process models in Appian, and you can publish events to Kafka from a process model so other systems can act on the new data.

To integrate with Kafka, you'll need:

• An Apache Kafka connected system that establishes a connection from Appian to your Kafka broker. This lets you set up the connection once and reuse it across event consumers and with the Publish Event smart service.
• An event consumer to consume events from a Kafka topic and act on each one based on their setup. You can configure multiple event consumers to perform different actions based on the details of the events.
• The Publish Event smart service to publish events from a process model to a Kafka topic. The Publish Event node supports JSON and Text formats and lets you control event routing by specifying a key, a partition, or both.

Use cases for consuming events

Your organization has already invested in an event-driven architecture, and your Appian integration with Kafka can work by starting a process model in response to an event published to a Kafka topic. There are many ways a Kafka integration can help connect a business process to an important event.

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Here are a few examples:

• An order management system publishes an event when a new order is placed. Appian consumes the event and starts a process to validate the order, check inventory, and notify the fulfillment team.
• A fraud detection system publishes events when it flags a transaction. Appian consumes the event and kicks off a review process, assigning a case to an analyst and pulling in related customer data.
• An HR system publishes an event when a new employee is onboarded. Appian consumes the event and starts a provisioning process to set up accounts, assign training, and schedule orientation.
• A partner system publishes shipping status updates. Appian consumes the events and updates the relevant records, then notifies customers when their shipment status changes.

Use cases for publishing events

Appian can also publish events back to a Kafka topic from a process model using the Publish Event smart service. Publishing events allows Appian to inform other systems after processing is complete.

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Here are a few examples:

• A loan underwriting process in Appian evaluates business rules and publishes the decision result to a Kafka topic so downstream fulfillment systems can act on the outcome.
• An Appian process completes a KYC review and publishes a completion signal to a Kafka topic, notifying the originating system that processing is finished.
• A claims processing workflow in Appian publishes status updates to a Kafka topic so external dashboards and notification systems can track claim progress in real time.

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