What is Event-Driven Architecture?
In event-driven systems, components communicate by publishing and consuming events rather than making direct calls to each other. This decoupling enables independent scaling and resilience.
Message Queues vs Event Streams
Message queues (RabbitMQ, SQS) are great for work distribution. Event streams (Kafka, Kinesis) are better for event sourcing and replaying history.
Choosing the Right Tool
- Use queues when you need guaranteed once-only processing
- Use streams when you need replay capability or multiple consumers
Pitfalls to Avoid
Event-driven systems can become hard to debug. Invest in distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin) early.