A fishing analogy for EventBridge filtering rules

We all know that our imagination can take us beyond the unthinkable. I was sitting inside a beautiful conference room in Stockholm, listening to a great talk on ‘Serverless Data Streaming at Scale’ by Anahit Pogosova at the AWS Nordics Community Day 2020. I was due to get to the stage next to talk about Amazon EventBridge and specifically about streamlining the microservices communications in an event-driven architecture.

As much as I wanted to listen in, my mind was searching for a simple analogy to explain the EventBridge event filtering and dispatch rules to the audience. Few thoughts came and went. I was still searching and thinking, and that’s when the lunch I had an hour ago flashed through my mind. I don’t recollect the name of the dish but it had salmon in it. Flash bulb moment and the idea was born!

Here we go…

Event flow

Imagine you go out fishing to a resourceful part of the sea. You see the abundance of fish in various types and shapes. These are like the different events carrying different information flowing through the event bus in EventBridge.

Remember that you still haven’t laid the nets out there yet. Hence all these fish are swimming freely and disappearing. This is the case when you don’t have any filtering rules set in EventBridge…