Event-Driven Architecture unlocks business value in real-time
A vast amount of the large monolithic business applications or codebases that represent the current norm, lack support for continuous innovation on a global scale (highly essential in digital business). The alternative is a relatively new contender: constellations of leaner, independently functioning codebases, popularly known as microservices.
Decomposing monoliths to microservices is just a first step. To be able to exploit business moments in real-time, you need something to tie these microservices together, like a Decentralised Event-Driven Architecture.
Solutions across industries need to become more dynamic to operate in an ever-growing landscape of new technologies like IoT, blockchain and machine learning. With sensors and computation spread throughout the world, it is easy to lose the real-time context of data and the opportunity of converting it to monetizable insight.
In most mainstream solutions, components are constrained by a centralised coordination mechanism. This means that all information exchanged by different components (devices, software and sensors alike) gets routed from the component to the centralised control mechanism to be bulk-processed — before it sometime later is returned to the original component with a response. These components and APIs’ are also often so tightly coupled to each other, that any changes or unforeseen errors originating from a single component risk affecting the entire service.
To accommodate exponential advancements happening all around us and capture the business value they ultimately provide, we need to change the way we model and design complex software. Modern digital services no longer fit the rigid or request/response designs or “one size fits all”-frameworks commonly used. Neither does it provide the flexibility or adaptability sorely needed for modern solution architectures or digital business.
How different systems and components relate and communicate in real-time is growing ever more relevant. In order to develop new business models in a competitive market, we need better context across different streams of data. It is paramount to capture any business moments (e.g. changes and unpredictable patterns) which allows the business to respond in real-time to reduce unforeseen risk or increase competitive advantage.
In Dolittle, we are convinced that the key to unlocking the business value of real-time response is Event-Driven Architecture, or for short: EDA.
A 2017 Gartner survey revealed that 58% of all CEO’s define growth as their highest business priority and points to EDA as a key technology approach to secure long-term growth.
Even though event-oriented approaches are already being used by many organisations, event-driven architecture is a rather uncommon application design approach. With EDA, Components remain autonomous with the ability to couple or decouple themselves based on the information (events) that is either created or consumed. This differs from how most systems are designed today and provides a whole new opportunity to create business context across a multitude of different sources, components and services. The non-linear, asynchronous environment of EDA also results in a highly versatile architecture adaptable to different circumstances.
While EDA provides a strong foundation for new growth, it tends to get complicated fast, mostly due to its highly distributed structures. It has also been an apparent lack of standardised frameworks and tools needed to handle the complexity and overall security challenges that follow microservices and loosely coupled components.
Some commodity tools have started to appear but often tries to do too much. Most of them cater to more generic IoT scenarios and therefore have fewer features relevant to what companies spend time on: line of business applications. In wording, they sound alike, but they are not the same use cases.
A significant portion of existing commodity tools is still based on a centralised piece, providing them with the competitive advantage of “lock-in”. This is a pity, considering that Dolittle views decentralisation and distribution as fundamental building blocks for EDA. Without it, one loses the much-needed fine-grained control on precisely what is needed to scale and increases resilience (spreading the overall load where it is required and not to a centrepiece that is constantly at a certain scale level).
There is no doubt that EDA will provide a whole new layer of value when used in combination with IoT and Edge scenarios, API management or as a solid, powerful foundation for any line of future proof business application.
I hope you are excited and eager to learn more about- and unlock the powerful potential of EDA. Please reach out to us if you are curious about how the Dolittle Open Source Framework can be used to succeed with EDA when creating Line of Business Applications.
