Marco on CEP

I have continued my googling session to see what’s up in the CEP world.

What strikes me is that CEP is not needed for most problems.

In the early years of CEP (that is, not that many years ago) one vendor boldly claimed that CEP would replace all databases and the era of stored data was to end very soon. That did not happen. And it will not happen in the future either.

Today many vendors, ‘experts’ and various projects have examples of what kind of problems their amazing CEP software is a good solution for.

Most of them are totally wrong, or at least not exactly right. Most of the problems can be solved with your traditional software stack containing app servers, datbases, messaging middleware and other types of more common software.

That’s why many CEP tools just don’t seem to catch on. They try to solve a problem which have a simpler solution.

There are offcourse areas where CEP is needed. Problems that don’t have a good solution using the traditional stack. Trading is one of them and there’s others. But CEP is a niche technology as it solves a very specific problem. It’s not a generic tool as some would like you to believe.

Said that. CEP is very  important and absolutely critical to have in your stack when you are facing the type of problems CEP is good at.  Most CEP products are just amazing when paired with the correct problem. Try to solve CEP problems with your traditional stack and you will spend 10 times the money on your implementation.

Why I bring up this is that many will be dissapointed on CEP technology if they think that CEP the solution for all kind of problems. It’s 10 times cheaper to use traditional software instead of CEP it you don’t need CEP capabilities…

Nothing new or magic here – Use the right tool for your problem..