What Is Event Driven Architecture, and When Should I Use It?

By Craig Godden-Payne@beardy.digital

Event-driven architecture is a software architecture paradigm promoting the production, detection, consumption of, and reaction to events.

How is an event-driven architecture implemented, and when would you use it?

Event driven architecture goes hand in hand with Microservices. When an action occurs, an event is created and this event is then used to drive decisions across anything that is waiting for that event to occur.

Services are no longer tied together, because in a publish subscribe type model, the caller is no longer calling the callee synchronously. Instead the callee acts upon an event in an eventually consistent way.

Because of this, event driven architectures can be more reliable, because they do not have to act upon a service call immediately (allowing services to be able to fail until they succeed) but are less predictable to know when an action has been performed (for the very same reason).

A simple example of an event driven architecture would be Amazon. If you have ever shopped at Amazon on a busy period, such as Black Friday, it is possible to order an item, but only to be sent an email…