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Awesome Event-Driven Architecture Awesome

A curated list of awesome articles and resources to learn about event-driven architecture.

Event-driven architecture is a software architecture approach where services collaborate by publishing and subscribing to events. This eliminates runtime coupling of services.

📕 Articles

Foundational

Going “Events-First” for Microservices with Event Storming and DDD

By Russ Miles, October 2016. _"It is **not the things** that matter in early stages of design - **it is the things that happen**."_

Events As First-Class Citizens

By Randy Shoup, January 2018. Focusses on the most important part of EDA: The actual events.

Why Event-First Programming Changes Everything

By Neil Avery, January 2019. Somewhat lengthy article that's great in painting the "big picture".

Introduction to Event-Driven Architecture

By Kacey Bui, February 2021. Good overview of the basics.

Orchestration vs. Choreography

By Ben Morris, December 2021. Every non-trivial system involves workflows that span multiple services. There are opposing schools of thought on how to handle this. Ben Morris gives a short, balanced introduction.

Experience Reports And Practicalities

Event Granularity: Modelling events in event driven applications

By Barry O'Sullivan, December 2017. About finding the right granularity for events.

Moving from orchestration to choreography

By Olivier Jauze, March 2021. Michelin's journey from BPM orchestration to event-driven choreography. It's the first of a series and continues with [part 2](https://blogit.michelin.io/moving-from-orchestration-to-choregraphy-part-2/) and [part 3](https://blogit.michelin.io/moving-from-orchestration-to-choreography-part-3/).

The different types of events in event-driven systems

By Frank de Jonge, February 2022. There are different approaches to classifying events - this is a very good one.

Reliable event dispatching using a transactional outbox

By Frank de Jonge, February 2022. Transactional outbox is a crucial pattern for services basing their persistence on CRUD/RDBMS.

Behind the scenes: McDonald's event-driven architecture

From the McDonald's tech blog, August 2022. Not very detailed, but an easily digestible case study about event-driven architecture at scale. Listing this here is not an endorsement of their products. There's a [second part](https://medium.com/mcdonalds-technical-blog/mcdonalds-event-driven-architecture-the-data-journey-and-how-it-works-4591d108821f), too.

Event Driven Architecture — 5 Pitfalls to Avoid

By Natan Silnitsky, August 2022. Especially when you only just get started, check this to spare you some frustration later. You might also want to check the "Further Reading" section at the end.

5 pitfalls to avoid when implementing an Event-Driven Architecture

By Kris Van Vlaenderen, January 2024. Sounds very similar to the previous one. But it's not a case of duplicate events - it's actually 5 different pieces of advice.

Event-Driven Patterns for Cloud-Native Banking: Lessons from What Works and What Hurts

By Chris Tacey-Green, March 2026. Based on production experience at Investec, the article covers both the benefits and the costs of running EDA in a regulated environment.

📺 Videos

Foundational

Core Decisions in Event-Driven Architecture

By Duana Stanley, October 2019. Overall a great talk, definitely worth watching. Below are some minor issues I have with it.

Event-Driven Architectures Done Right

By Tim Berglund, May 2021. Good overview, clear presentation.

Event Driven Architecture & Governance in Action

By Wim Debreuck, June 2023. A talk that goes beyond the technical fundamentals, into the architecture and design process of event-driven applications. The shown approach might not be universal, but provides important insights. I especially like the clarity around business events.

Event-Driven Architecture Explained in 15 Minutes

By Dave Farley, July 2024. Watching videos by Dave Farley is always time well spent, and his short take on event-driven architecture is no exception.

  • The advice to use ids in events to refer to other entities is not wrong, but needs deeper discussion.
    • I don't like the term "command events", something is either a command or an event.
    • In the end she hints at Kafka as an event store, I don't think that's good idea.

Experience Reports And Practicalities

EDA in Practice: Building an eCommerce Platform at Cinch

By Toli Apostolidis, September 2022. You can ignore the first 8 minutes and 15 seconds (in fact the link will skip them), they are mostly promotion for AWS. But from there on follows a good talk on real-world experiences with event-driven architecture.

What is the Transactional Outbox Pattern?

By Wade Waldron, February 2024. A short video (just over 5 minutes) explaining what the transactional outbox pattern is and how it works.

Shifting Gears: From Events to Event-Driven

By Ryan Cormack, May 2024. He tells the story of Motorway's journey to event driven, and also includes a lot of foundational aspects.

Related Topics

Event Sourcing – What, Why & How

By Anita Kvamme, June 2024. While also event based, _Event Sourcing_ is not the same as _Event-Driven Architecture_. They complement each other well, but you can also use either without the other. Thankfully, this great overview of Event Sourcing makes that clear at the very start.

Footnotes

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