Integration Patterns V is out now! Event-Driven architecture is pretty well-defined in textbooks (and the definition is complex..trust me) but what people care about when they talk about anything "event-driven" is almost always: 1. Loosely coupled and independently-deployable systems, 2. which communicate without direct RPC calls, 3. and fast, responsive, up-to-date data processing + data liberation. As much as I love Kafka it's often hard to get EDA right...so I've been writing (and just finished) a blog series about five tools to make EDA more reliable, and how you can implement these tools more easily with a workflow engine: 1. The SAGA Pattern, in which you undo previous actions in a multi-step process when a later step fails. 2. The Outbox Pattern, which lets you reliably update two separate systems without a transaction or 2PC 3. Queuing, which lets you offload heavy processing to improve reliability and latency 4. Retries and Dead-Letter Queues, which make sure your business processes complete even when things go wrong 5. Callbacks and External Events, for when your process needs to wait for external input. Technically I did try to make them "marketing," but I am an engineer at heart (and we hate marketing fluff) so hopefully there's some useful content in there.