NO SILVER BULLET Event Driven Architecture: The Hard Parts
Jun 5, 2025
Event-driven architecture (EDA) offers scalability, but it’s fraught with challenges. The importance of observability can't be overstated, as debugging without proper tracing is a nightmare. Beware of over-engineering; sometimes a simple synchronous system may suffice. The outbox pattern emerges as a pragmatic solution for data consistency. Designing events carefully is crucial, balancing between specificity and complexity, while robust error handling ensures reliability. The discussion dives deep into managing complexities like message ordering and unprocessable messages.
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Observability Prevents Lost Events
- Losing events in event-driven systems is mostly about misconfiguration or misuse rather than message broker failure.
- Proper observability with tracing and correlation IDs is crucial for debugging asynchronous flows.
Accept Eventual Consistency
- Embrace eventual consistency rather than strict synchronous consistency to improve UX and system resilience.
- Communicate expected delays in data propagation clearly to stakeholders and users.
Outbox Pattern Ensures Consistency
- Use the outbox pattern to atomically store changes and events in one database transaction.
- Stream events later asynchronously to the message broker to avoid lost messages.
