The Real Truth About Event-Driven Architecture

Event-Driven Architecture often gets hailed as the ultimate way to build loosely coupled, infinitely scalable systems—but there are some caveats. You need to distinguish between design-time coupling (how your code is wired together) and temporal coupling (how services wait on each other at runtime). And remember, scaling out doesn’t magically eliminate bottlenecks; it just pushes them elsewhere if you’re not careful.

On top of that, complex workflows stitched across multiple services can quickly become a debugging nightmare and are usually a design smell. If you need strict ordering or cross-service transactions, you might be forcing EDA where a simpler, more bounded approach would work better. The real secret sauce is defining clear service boundaries and thinking through event ordering before you dive in.

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