Atomic Operation Event Delivery Methods

Events can be delivered to a third-party system via various degrees of mechanics. These are outlined on this page. Some are only suitable to be used in our sandbox environment as they do not scale to support production environments.

HTTP Post

The most basic delivery mechanism is via an HTTP POST request. This mechanism takes the JSON event payload and delivers it to a configured endpoint. These endpoints can be secured with a static pre-shared header that does not change.

Advantages

• Fast to set up
• Can handle volumes of events very well

Disadvantages

• As the security is via a static pre-shared header key, the security mechanism in place is not the most secure.

Authenticated Request

Similar to the HTTP POST mechanism, the data is transferred via an HTTP endpoint. This mechanism however, supports OAuth to secure the endpoint. An authorisation server is provided where a token is generated. This token is subsequently used in webhook calls until it has expired, at which time a new token is generated.

Advantages

• Very secure
• Many enterprise platforms support OAuth out of the box, so it adds little effort to set up.

Disadvantages

• Smaller platforms often do not have this capability readily available to use.

SFTP

This mechanic delivers events as files to a platform that supports SFTP. This is very powerful for initial integration and build, as it gives easy access to event files as they are produced.

❗️

NOT FOR PRODUCTION

This delivery mechanism must not be used in production environments.

Advantages

• SFTP is a readily available technology
• Fast setup
• Powerful for integration into an event stream

Disadvantages

• This mechanic does not scale and must NOT be used in production environments
• As files are delivered to the same location, unless actively purged, the target folders will quickly become unreadable due to the volume of files in a single directory.

PubSub to PubSub

This delivery mechanism allows Google Cloud-based platforms to receive an event stream directly from AIR into their own PubSub topics to be processed.

Advantages

• Very fast delivery
• Very high throughput of message delivery
• Secured with Google Service Accounts

Disadvantages

• Requires the third party to be Google Cloud-based for their infrastructure
• Slightly more effort and configuration to set up due to the need for service accounts and security setup
• Third third-party platform still needs to build something to process the messages from their PubSub topics

Google Cloud Storage

This mechanism delivers files into a Google Cloud Storage bucket. Similar to SFTP, this delivery route is subject to similar restrictions as SFTP

Advantages

• Secure and uses GCP Service Accounts to set up the access

Disadvantages

• Subject to the same file reading from a single source restriction as SFTP
• Supports a slower throughput of data than other delivery mechanisms.