The Real Truth About Event-Driven Architecture

Event-driven systems often get sold as the holy grail of loose coupling and infinite scalability, but as this deep-dive shows, you just move your bottlenecks around—design-time coupling disappears, yet temporal coupling (think “who’s waiting on what and when”) still bites you. And don’t get me started on those glamorous cross-service workflows: they’re usually a design smell in disguise.

On top of that, ordering events isn’t a magic wand—out-of-order or missed events can wreck your data, so you need clear boundaries and sensible strategies (like idempotency or versioning) to keep things sane. In short, EDA rocks when used wisely, but it’s no panacea.

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