Event-driven systems

Orchestration vs choreography for microservice workflows

5 December 2021

Orchestration and choreography can complement each other. There doesn’t have to be an exclusive choice between two opposing styles.

When is an event not an event?

8 February 2020

Message design in an event-driven architecture can be quite nuanced, especially if you want to achieve any of the benefits of loose coupling that they can be associated with.

When should you write your own message endpoint library?

14 December 2019

Enterprise messaging patterns are complex beasts that often warrant a common implementation across your endpoints. Should you ever be tempted to roll your own?

Messaging anti-patterns in event-driven architecture

12 October 2018

Event-driven integration can improve the scalability, resilience and scalability of distributed applications… but this does depend on the design of your event messages…

Autonomous bubbles and event streams: Pragmatic approaches to working with legacy systems

29 July 2018

It’s easy to get caught up in unrealistic notions that you can re-write a legacy system or gradually decompose it. There are other, more pragmatic approaches that can help to modernise architectures and enable new development.

Events, sagas and workflows: managing long-running processes between services

4 November 2017

An event-driven architecture can give rise to complex chains of events that are difficult to manage. These problems can be mitigated through careful design rather than resorting to shared state databases or workflow engines.

Event stores and event sourcing: some practical disadvantages and problems

7 January 2017

Event stores and event sourcing are a powerful idea, but they can be vulnerable to a number of technical and operational challenges when faced with real world complexity.

Designing an event store for scalable event sourcing

29 July 2016

Event sourcing can scale very nicely, though this does depend on a number of key design decisions for the underlying event store.

Data design for event-driven architecture: autonomy, encapsulation and ordering

1 February 2016

When you’re implementing an event-driven architecture, the design of your events is absolutely critical to realize the benefits of loose coupling.

Comparing nServiceBus and MassTransit: Do we still need .Net integration frameworks?

26 November 2015

Both nServiceBus and Mass Transit plugged an important gap in Microsoft’s integration landscape, but do they have a role in a future that is likely to be dominated by diverse technologies and autonomous agile teams?

Don’t assume message ordering in Azure Service Bus

16 December 2014

Azure Service Bus can provide first-in-first-out messaging in theory, but this is not the same as guaranteeing the order in which your messages are processed.

Messaging shouldn’t be used for queries

21 August 2014

When developers first start using messaging they can be tempted to use it as a brand new hammer for every nail. Messaging brings a lot to the party, but it isn’t necessarily a suitable transport for fast, synchronous query processing.

Eventual consistency and the trade-offs required by distributed development

4 May 2014

Developers who have been brought up on the certainties of ACID transactions often have a problem trusting eventual consistency. Once you start exploring the requirements in more depth this really so much of a handicap.