The dark side of events

Vladik Khononov (DoiT International)

16:50–17:35 Wednesday, 6 November 2019

Location: M8

Application architecture

Secondary topics: Anti-Pattern, Best Practice, Theoretical

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Who is this presentation for?

Software architects

Level

Intermediate

Description

Events are our industry’s near and dear. All technological conferences are full of talks on event sourcing, event-driven architectures, or event driven integrations. So, hey, why not make another one? But a bit different: let’s talk about the dark side of this pattern.

Events, as any tool, can be used productively or destructively. During the last eight years, Internovus found so many creative ways to do the latter: the different ways events can introduce coupling so strong it make the classic enterprise monolith envious, multiple ways of using events to introduce accidental complexity, how to use events to turn a microservice into an architectural Trojan horse, and why some events, just like underwear, are better kept private.

Those insights aren’t for the faint of heart, but fear not. You’ll get heuristics to help you identify those situations, eliminate event-driven accidental complexities, and make events great again.

Prerequisite knowledge

A basic understanding of distributed systems and microservices

What you'll learn

Understand that events can be abused and can damage the architecture
Discover how to identify situations in which events inflict coupling
Learn heuristics for effectively applying events in event-driven architectures

Vladik Khononov

DoiT International

Vladik (Vlad) Khononov is a software engineer with over 15 years of industry experience at companies large and small in roles ranging from webmaster to chief architect. A longtime proponent of domain-driven design and evolutionary architecture, Vlad helps companies make sense of their business domains, untangle monoliths, and tackle complex architectural challenges. He maintains an active media career as a public speaker and blogger and has spoken at numerous industry conferences—including O’Reilly Software Architecture, Domain-Driven Design Europe, and NDC Conference—about subjects such as domain-driven design, microservices, and software architecture in general. In addition to his media work, he co-organizes the Domain-Driven Design Israel and Tel Aviv Software Architecture meetup groups. He lives in northern Israel with his wife and an almost-reasonable number of cats.