Enterprise software are build to be scalable, agile and highly available solutions. Event driven architecture is enabling enterprises to operate in real-time, scale and adapt to feature changes quickly.
Event driven architecture is a design paradigm in which a software component executes in response to receiving one or more event notifications.
How is an event driven architecture implemented?
Event driven architecture goes hand in hand with microservices. When an action occurs, an event is created and this event is then used to drive decisions across anything that is waiting for that event to occur.
Services are no longer tied together, because in a publish subscribe type model, the caller is no longer calling the callee synchronously. Instead the callee acts upon an event in an eventually consistent way.
Because of this, event driven architectures can be more reliable, because they do not have to act upon a service call immediately. But they are less predictable to know when an action has been performed.
Event driven architectures can use a queue as a backing model in combination with a publish subscribe model. This is to guarantee delivery of event messages, in the event that some service in the chain is unable to process an event.
What are advantages of using event driven architecture?
There are a few reasons why using an event driven architecture can be an advantage over alternative architectures.
Loose coupling:
Services do not need to be dependent on each other. This applies different factors such as transport protocol, availability (the service being online) and the data being sent. The consumer will still need to know how to interpret an event or message so a strict contract should still be used between the two services, but implementation details of the contract should not matter.
Scalability:
Since the services are no longer coupled, the throughput of service 1, no longer needs to meet the throughput of service 2. This can help reduce costs as services no longer need to be online 24/7 and it is possible to take advantage of serverless computing with scaling.
Asynchronicity:
Since services are no longer dependent on a result being returned synchronously, a fire and forget model can be used, which can greatly speed up a process. This can have a downside, which will be outlined below.
Point in time recovery:
If events are backed by a queue or maintaining some kind of history, it is possible to replay events, or even go back in time and recover state.
Wrapping Up
Event driven architecture can be implemented across enterprise software and SaaS for
- Integration with third party SaaS-based application
- IoT Applications
- BPM/Automation Applications
- Fintech applications
For expert solutions on event driven architecture for your software and SaaS, you can opt for a trusted integration solution provider.