AWS Architecture Blog
Let’s Architect! Designing event-driven architectures
During the design of distributed systems, we have to identify a communication strategy to exchange information between different services while keeping the evolutionary nature of the architecture in mind. Event-driven architectures are based on events (facts that happened in a system), which are asynchronously exchanged to implement communication across different services while having a high degree of decoupling. This paradigm also allows us to run code in response to events, with benefits like cost optimization and sustainability for the entire infrastructure.
In this edition of Let’s Architect!, we share architectural resources to introduce event-driven architectures, how to build them on AWS, and how to approach the design phase.
AWS re:Invent 2022 – Keynote with Dr. Werner Vogels
re:Invent 2022 may be finished, but the keynote given by Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Werner Vogels, will not be forgotten. Vogels not only covered the announcements of new services but also event-driven architecture foundations in conjunction with customers’ stories on how this architecture helped to improve their systems.
Take me to this re:Invent 2022 video!
Dr. Werner Vogels presenting an example of architecture where Amazon EventBridge is used as event bus
Benefits of migrating to event-driven architecture
In this blog post, we enumerate clearly and concisely the benefits of event-driven architectures, such as scalability, fault tolerance, and developer velocity. This is a great post to start your journey into the event-driven architecture style, as it explains the difference from request-response architecture.
Take me to this Compute Blog post!
Two common options when building applications are request-response and event-driven architectures
Building next-gen applications with event-driven architectures
When we build distributed systems or migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture, we need to identify a communication strategy to integrate the different services. Teams who are building microservices often find that integration with other applications and external services can make their workloads tightly coupled.
In this re:Invent 2022 video, you learn how to use event-driven architectures to decouple and decentralize application components through asynchronous communication. The video introduces the differences between synchronous and asynchronous communications before drilling down into some key concepts for designing and building event-driven architectures on AWS.
Take me to this re:Invent 2022 video!
How to use choreography to exchange information across services plus implement orchestration for managing operations within the service boundaries
Designing events
When starting on the journey to event-driven architectures, a common challenge is how to design events: “how much data should an event contain?” is a typical first question we encounter.
In this pragmatic post, you can explore the different types of events, watch a video that explains even further how to use event-driven architectures, and also go through the new event-driven architecture section of serverlessland.com.
An example of events with sparse and full state description
See you next time!
Thanks for reading our first blog of 2023! Join us next time, when we’ll talk about architecture and sustainability.
To find all the blogs from this series, visit the Let’s Architect! section of the AWS Architecture Blog.