Building Event-Driven Systems: Principles, Challenges, and Best Practices

Explore the fundamentals and intricacies of building event-driven systems in this comprehensive conference talk from Conf42 Cloud Native 2024. Delve into key concepts such as low coupling, high cohesion, and the benefits of event-driven architecture. Learn about event carried state transfer, evolvability, and governance in event-driven systems. Discover the pros and cons of fat versus sparse events, the importance of embracing metadata and asynchronous thinking, and the role of eventual consistency. Gain insights on observability, setting boundaries, and starting small when implementing event-driven architectures. This 35-minute presentation covers essential topics for developers and architects looking to leverage event-driven design in their cloud-native applications.

Syllabus

intro
preamble
eda
james eastham
you learn much more in failure than you do in success
aim for low coupling and high cohesion
why be event-driven?
what does it mean to be event-driven?
events are first class citizens... ?
event carried state transfer
evolvability - a core feature of event-driven architecture
now what?
governance
so, fat vs sparse events?
embrace the metadata / data pattern
asynchronous - what happens when you think async?
embrace eventual consistency
observability - what happens when things break?
boundaries - surely you need synchronous sometimes?
start small
thank you for listening