The Perils of Event-Driven: Eventual Consistency
Recently I wrote about the challenges of event sourcing and CQRS in this article “What they don’t tell you about event sourcing”. A manager once told me “If you bring me a problem and don’t bring me the solution then you are the problem”. In light of this, I will address most of the issues I raised in the previous article and share my experience on how to tackle them. The topic of this article it’s arguably the hardest and most frustrating characteristic of distributed systems, eventual consistency.
The silver bullet
Ben Horowitz once said that there are no silver bullets. But to eventual consistency there is, the holy grail to deal with eventual consistency, the one fits all solution, perhaps the greatest secret of our time:
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*drum roll*
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Do not use an eventually consistent model. Yeah, that’s it. If I was sitting next to you I’m sure I could hear your eyes roll, but bear with me.
One thing people often do is decide the technical implementation disregarding the business implications. As long as the solution complies with the requirements it is fine to use the sexiest, most hyped pattern or technology in the market.
