The Real Truth About Event-Driven Architecture

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) promises loose coupling and skyrocketing scalability, but it often just shifts bottlenecks around and hides new complexities. You’ve got to distinguish temporal coupling (runtime dependencies) from design-time coupling (tight API contracts), or you’ll end up trading one problem for another. And beware: stitching complex multi-service workflows together with events is usually a design smell waiting to bite you later.

Ordering matters, too—if you can’t guarantee the right sequence, your system will behave unpredictably. Instead of blindly firing off events everywhere, focus on clear service boundaries and own your data flows. That way you get the benefits of EDA without turning your architecture into an unmanageable spaghetti maze.

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