The Real Truth About Event-Driven Architecture

Event-driven architectures sell themselves on loose coupling and infinite scalability, but don’t be fooled: you trade design-time dependencies for runtime ones, and you often just move your performance bottleneck elsewhere. Scattering complex workflows across multiple services may look cool on a whiteboard, but in practice it’s a design smell that breeds hidden coupling and operational headaches.

Order matters, too—without clear event ordering and well-defined service boundaries, your system can quickly devolve into chaos. The key isn’t blindly adopting EDA, but understanding when to lean on temporal versus design-time coupling, keeping workflows contained, and defining boundaries that actually make sense.

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