OpenMessaging Connect is a standard to connect between data sources and data destinations. Users could easily create connector instances with configurations via REST API.
There are two types of connectors: source connector and sink connector. A source connector is used for pulling data from a data source (e.g. RDBMS). The data is sent to corresponding message queue and expected to be consumed by one or many sink connectors. A sink connector receives message from the queue and loads into a data destination (e.g. data warehouse). Developers should implement source or sink connector interface to run their specific job.
Usually, connectors rely on a concrete message queue for data transportation. The message queue decouples source connectors from sink connectors. In the meantime, it provides capabilities such as failover, rate control and one to many data transportation etc. Some message queues (e.g. Kafka) provide bundled connect frameworks and a various of connectors developed officially or by the community. However, these frameworks are lack of interoperability, which means a connector developed for Kafka cannot run with RabbitMQ without modification and vice versa.
A connector follows OpenMessaging Connect could run with any message queues which support OpenMessaging API. OpenMessaging Connect provides a standalone runtime which uses OpenMessaging API for sending and consuming message, as well as the key/value operations for offset management.
This runtime is based on interface openmessaging-connector.