7 Ways to Use Event Notifications to Streamline Application Workflows

Event-driven infrastructure is at the core of modern application development. It helps businesses streamline processes like transcoding user-uploaded video or processing images for tagging, kicks off downstream workflows immediately, and reduces complexity by automating multi-step processes across distributed services.

Today, I'm sharing seven ways you can use Backblaze Event Notifications to accelerate application workflows, automate processes, streamline operations, and scale revenue. If you're interested in Event Notifications, but you're not using it to run applications, stay tuned for future posts sharing use cases for media management and backup and archive.

Event Notifications for applications: Simplified automation

Event Notifications delivers near real-time alerts for changes in B2 Cloud Storage, simplifying workflows across the services that interact with your stored data. Teams can use Event Notifications to create end-to-end processes that scale efficiently and integrate directly with any external service that accepts webhooks. This means no more manual monitoring of storage or relying on complex intermediaries.

Automating common application tasks with Event Notifications allows you to reduce operational overhead by minimizing manual monitoring, accelerate processes across integrations with your preferred services, and reduce manual entry errors that can cost enterprises time and money.

Top 7 use cases for applications

Let's explore some practical ways Event Notifications can be leveraged within your tech stack:

1. User-generated content processing

For applications dealing with user-uploaded content, Event Notifications can be used to trigger tasks immediately upon data upload. Imagine a user uploading a video or image: An Event Notification could be sent to a transcoding service to format it, a tagging service to categorize it, or even a moderation tool to ensure it complies with your community standards-all in near real time, without manual intervention.

Social platform workflow

By automating these processes, companies can ensure that user-generated content is formatted correctly, appropriately tagged, and moderated without delay. This not only saves time but guarantees a consistent user experience.

2. Integrated alerts with automation tools

Event Notifications can easily integrate with productivity tools like Slack and Zapier, or any service that accepts a webhook, making it easy to provide team-wide awareness into changes in your storage environment without manual checks. This keeps teams informed and at the ready to be able to respond immediately to critical events.

Asset tracking and monitoring workflow

Additionally, for teams using workflow platforms such as Zapier to connect various services, Event Notifications makes it simple to trigger actions across multiple platforms, enabling powerful, automated workflows with your data in B2 Cloud Storage.

3. Surveillance and streaming automation

For applications managing large video files, such as surveillance or streaming platforms, Event Notifications can help automate the processing and distribution workflows. Videos can be transcoded, compressed, and prepared for delivery or playback promptly.

Streaming platform workflow

This automation is also useful for time-sensitive content, where quick turnaround is essential. Automating video processing reduces the manual effort involved and ensures content is always ready for viewing in the preferred format as soon as it's available.

4. AI workload automation

For businesses building AI applications, Event Notifications can be used to trigger AI workloads in real time, enabling faster processing and response. For instance, when new data is uploaded, alerts can trigger downstream services to process that data, such as converting images to text or analyzing content for insights.

AI image to text workflow

In this case, this AI workflow ensures tasks start the moment data becomes available. Whether you're running an image recognition service, analyzing datasets, or building AI models, Event Notifications eliminates the delays that come with manual processing. No matter what your downstream service is, Event Notifications provides the flexibility to integrate seamlessly with your AI workflows, improving real-time processing capabilities and enabling teams to focus on delivering better solutions rather than managing manual data flow.

5. Monitor data usage

Since Event Notifications messages are sent within seconds of files being uploaded and deleted, and contain the size of the file in question, you can easily and reliably track your data usage in near real time, helping you identify trends and potential issues.

Monitoring workflow

In contrast with periodic usage reports, near real-time monitoring allows you to respond to situations as they are happening, mitigating risks and potentially reducing costs.

6. Respond to security events

Event Notifications can feed near real-time data to security information and event management (SIEM) systems, allowing you to detect and respond to anomalous access patterns as they are happening.

Security alert workflow

Event Notifications allows you to take a proactive, rather than reactive, security posture, again mitigating risks and reducing costs.

7. Automatically trigger data integration

Event Notifications enable your data integration workloads to run within seconds of new data being uploaded to Backblaze B2, continuously delivering data to analytical systems and dashboards, giving you a live view of the state of your business.

Data integration workflow

Delivering data to dashboards within seconds or minutes of its availability enables near real-time insights, faster decision-making, and the ability to react to events as they occur.

Beyond these example use cases, Event Notifications opens up a wide range of possibilities for automating and optimizing workflows. You can use Event Notifications to automate metadata extraction and tagging for better content organization, and handle errors programmatically by triggering reprocessing tasks whenever issues arise. This flexibility makes it easy to automate how your infrastructure interacts with and reacts to data changes in B2 Cloud Storage, simplifying workflows across your distributed services.

Why Event Notifications matter for application workflows

The benefits of real-time notifications extend beyond simply saving time-they transform the way teams work, automate processes, and reduce the margin for error.

• Awareness: Instant notifications for data changes, uploads, or deletions keep everyone on the same page.
• Actionable insights: Whether it's confirming a successful upload or catching an unexpected change, real-time alerts provide critical information that helps make informed decisions quickly.
• Flexibility: Direct connections to services like transcoding, compute, or serverless applications mean more choice and less lock-in to specific vendors or tools.
• Improved security: By instantly alerting teams to unauthorized changes or unusual activity, Event Notifications help maintain data integrity and support proactive security measures.
• Cost efficiency: Automating tasks like media transcoding, data processing, or content delivery reduces the need for manual labor, saving on operational costs and freeing up resources for other strategic initiatives.

How Event Notifications compares

Unlike other offerings like Amazon's messaging services, which are limited to specific ecosystems, Event Notifications integrates directly with any service that accepts webhooks, offering true flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Event Notifications is also designed for at-least-once delivery, ensuring critical notifications are not missed. This reliability is important for teams building workflows that require precision and a level of consistency their end users expect.

The pricing for Event Notifications is simple and transparent, with 2,500 calls per day free, and just $0.004 per 10,000 transactions. This straightforward pricing applies no matter the service receiving the notification. This enables businesses to confidently scale their event-driven workflows, knowing exactly what to expect in terms of costs, regardless of the services they choose to integrate with.

Ready to add automation to your application?

For existing customers working with a Backblaze account manager, Event Notifications is already enabled for you, and your account manager can assist with any questions. If you're an existing customer not currently working with an account manager, please contact our Support team to request access to Event Notifications.

New customers can contact our Sales team to learn more about how Event Notifications can streamline workflows and how to get started.

Once Event Notifications are enabled, log in to your Backblaze B2 account, navigate to the Buckets page, and click on the Event Notifications section. From there, you can set up notification rules for the events you want to track or configure notifications using our API.

For detailed instructions and best practices, visit our Event Notifications documentation.

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