Event-driven architecture, also known as EDA, is proving to be an ideal model for application design. This architecture pattern relies on certain event triggers, that can help different businesses and enterprises achieve both flexibility and scalability, for real-time adaptation and decision-making. While this may sound simple, it gets fairly complex.
EDA also differs from event notifications in several significant ways. EDA requires the transmission of events between event producers and event consumers. To better understand how EDA works and how it can drive sales, here’s what you need to know.
EDA is defined by several key components
Event-driven architecture (EDA), as mentioned, relays state changes from the event producer or event source, to the event consumer. This can take place across several event channels. Once an event stream passes through an event channel, it is then put up to be processed by an event platform. Depending on the event channel, the consumer will choose to either process the event or simply see its impact on the application state. There are varied event generators for simple events or more complex events.
Knowing how EDA differs from event notifications is a little more straightforward. Notifications, or event messages, are simply sent by the event generator to a different part of the business process, in order to notify the various parts that state changes have taken place. There is little latency for these notifications and many happen in near real-time. However, depending on your software components or event processors, parallel event messages may not fire synchronously.
What is an event?
A simple event is defined as any significant change or state change for your business systems, and their hardware and software. You may simply see one notable event, a sequence of events or a stream of events. Event emitters may be internally or externally based. Also, depending on application use cases, an event may occur as a result of user input, although these scenarios do vary. User-direct events can include mouse clicks and keystrokes, which are more simple events. More complex events include loading a program, or external sensors picking up changes.
Depending on the source system, your event queue may be made up of microservices or larger specific tasks that factor into your logic flow. It will also depend on the processors you incorporate into your system. There are numerous popular processing platforms and a great number of these provide for a wide variety of use cases, and have proven fairly resilient for a number of event streams.
EDA has numerous real-world benefits
For stakeholders, it’s important to understand how event stream processing works withing a source system and the impact it can have on different systems. For a flexible system, EDA is perhaps the highest priority. As events occur, they are captured by a variety of different IoT (Internet of Things) devices and networks. When this happens, producers and consumers are able to handle response information in real-time. This helps applications navigate the event queue, and simplifies transmission from the event emitter to the consumer. This improves scalability and application responsiveness. On top of this, event correlation can improve business transactions and workflow by providing for scenario analytics. These analytics provide a lot of data depending on the type of event and can benefit both the emitter and the listener. This enables businesses to make smarter, more data-driven decisions regarding their logic flow.
EDA is proving increasingly popular amongst programmers for application connectivity and scalability. Regardless of your chosen endpoint, EDA can help you tackle different facets of your applications with ease, and greater levels of flexibility. This is a boon to stakeholders and developers alike, and it’s likely that the uses of EDA will only continue to grow.
