The Real Truth About Event-Driven Architecture

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) isn’t the silver bullet it’s often portrayed as. While it does decouple services at design time, you’re trading in tight coupling for sneaky temporal coupling that can hide failures and shift – not solve – bottlenecks. Piling on more instances or partitions might boost throughput, but your core contention points remain.

Beyond scaling myths, stitching complex workflows across multiple event handlers quickly becomes a design smell, leading to fragile, hard-to-debug systems. And don’t underestimate event ordering: if you can’t enforce clear boundaries and consistency guarantees, you’ll end up wrestling with race conditions and unpredictable states. Focus on sensible service boundaries and embrace simplicity over over-engineered choreography.

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