Overview

What is Equinix Messaging Gateway?

Equinix Messaging Gateway (EMG) is an event-driven solution by Equinix for system-to-system integration between customer's in-house application to Platform Equinix. EMG leverages queuing solution to enable customers to place orders for supported Equinix Products & Services, and receive notifications for latest status on customer orders & assets. The core value proposition of EMG is its scalability, security & simplicity.

EMG is suitable for customers who:

  • utilize multiple colocation or network infrastructure providers.
  • have significant asset presence in Equinix and other Infrastructure Partners.
  • have their own unified central application for control of services from Infrastructure partners.
  • are a large email user for operational control.
  • believe the current methods of datacenter operation control (emails) are predicted to be an impediment to growth.

Watch this video to know more about EMG and Equinix Products & Services supported through this solution.

Supported Equinix Products & Services

1. Order Management:

  • Create/Update/Cancel Order - BreakFix/Trouble Tickets, Cross Connect, Shipments, SmartHands, and WorkVisit
  • Receive Notifications for latest Order Status, Queries and Updates from Equinix technicians while working on customer orders etc.

2. Equinix Notifications:

  • Network Notifications - Equinix Fabric Port & Virtual Connection Status Notifications
  • Equinix DataCenter Notifications - DataCenter Planned/Unplanned Maintenance & Incidents
  • Billing Notifications - Order is Closed & Billing is started by Equinix

How does Equinix Messaging Gateway work?

Customer Onboarding

  1. When a customer is on-boarded, they are provided with a unique customer identifier and dedicated queues are provisioned to exchange request and response events. Customers can also bring their own queues for receiving notifications from Equinix.

  2. Customer & Equinix will generate public-private key pair & exchange the public keys (pkcs8). Customer must use its private key to sign each message sent to Equinix. Once the message is received, Equinix will use customer’s public key to verify the message. Similarly, Equinix will sign each message sent to the customer. On receiving the message, customer will use Equinix public key to verify the message.

  3. The customer must work with their Equinix CSM and Master Administrators to get access to Equinix Developer Platform and generate a Consumer Key (Client ID) and Consumer Secret (Client Secret). This Consumer Key and Secret must be generated for a user who has access to all customer assets and permission to submit tickets with Equinix. The Consumer Key and Secret must then be shared with Equinix when configuring EMG.

Message Format
All incoming and outgoing messages between Equinix and the customer will have the following components. Refer to the Getting Started section for more details on request, response & notifications messages for individual order & workflow.

Task
- Header attributes
- Body
Signature

Message skeleton

Copy 
{
"Task": {
    "Header attribute 1": "",
    "Header attribute 2": "",
    "Header attribute 3": "",
    ...
    "Body": {
    "Body attribute 1": "",
    "Body attribute 2": "",
    "Body attribute 3": "",
    ...
    }
},
"Signature": "Base 64 encrypted signature"
}

Equinix Messaging Gateway Workflow

A) Order Management Workflows

The following diagram illustrates a high-level workflow of how EMG works using queues for order related workflow:

Step 1 - Customers places an order to Equinix by creating a message based on a pre-agreed format.

Step 2 - The message is pushed into an Equinix owned queue.

Step 3 - Equinix reads the queue and processes the request.

Step 4 - Once the message is processed. Equinix creates a response message.

Step 5 - The response message will be pushed into a customer outgoing queue. Equinix also emits subsequent notifications with latest order status into a customer outgoing queue.

Step 6 - The customer processes the incoming message.

B) Equinix Notification Workflows

The following diagram illustrates a high-level workflow of how EMG works using queues for Equinix notifications for non-transactional workflow:

Step 1 - Equinix IT Systems & Services monitors Equinix DataCenter. They trigger internal alerts for planned & unplanned maintenance and incidents.

Step 2 - Once the message is processed. Equinix creates a notification message with details of the maintenance & incident. The response message will be pushed into a customer outgoing queue.

Step 3 - The customer processes the incoming message.