The Event Bus

At the heart of Horizon lies an event bus. Any Horizon component can publish events to the bus, and any component can subscribe to receive events of interest that have been published on the bus. This publish-subscribe model enables components to use events as a mechanism to send messages to each other.

For example, the provisioning subsystem of Horizon publishes a node-added event whenever a new node is added to the system. Other subsystems with an interest in new nodes subscribe to the node-added event and automatically receive these events, so they know to start monitoring and managing the new node if their configuration dictates. The publisher and subscriber components do not need to have any knowledge of each other, allowing for a clean division of labor and lessening the programming burden to add entirely new Horizon subsystems or modify the behavior of existing ones.