Breaking down buzzwords: Creating an adaptable event-driven architecture

Description

The premise is compelling: build an architecture of microservices with an event-driven technology at its center, decoupling the services from each other and lowering the reliance on one another. This architecture allows for a natural hierarchy of sorts, allowing the enterprise to consider the level at which data is required and share on an as-needed basis.

There is a tendency to hear best practices for architecture and apply all rules to your situation where it doesn’t necessary apply. By adhering to strict guidelines, you feel safer and more justified in your decisions. Amanda Gilbert has seen companies do this with event-driven architectures, neglecting reason and exception for the sake of best practice. Within the world of EDA, you gain a unique ability to put a personal touch on your “best practices,” lending to exceptionally performant and unique systems that drive your business value beyond the status quo. Although software comes with default configurations, tuning said configurations can make your software more performant. The same should be done for architecture. Amanda identifies the places within the standard that allow for flexibility and helps you rethink the way you architect event-driven systems.

There are many common misconceptions about EDAs that confine the thinking of solutions architects and engineers. One is that all EDAs require solely asynchronous processing. Although the asynchronous nature of EDAs allows for unique functionality to expand your microservices architectures, asynchronous processes can live alongside synchronous processes that exist within your current architecture.

Amanda details stateless versus stateful stream processing, countering ideas that architects suggest an architecture needs to be implicitly one or the other. The use cases she draws on, show how you can be more flexible when making design decisions and don’t have to be rigid to industry best practice. Join in to discover when to use the status quo and when to adapt it for your unique business.