Event-driven architectures are a common feature in microservices that uses events to trigger and communicate between decoupled services. This is popularly regarded as an asynchronous form of communication. In other words, similar to certain types of text messages one receives, where one does not know who the receiver is or whether anyone reads it, the point is that neither party is expecting a response. It hence acts as a notification. As a result, this form of architecture replaced the traditional “request/response” style, which depended on a response. Since event-driven architectures do not reply to responses, real-time responsive architectures can be made. While changing infrastructure can be quite expensive, according to a study carried out by Solace, 71% of organisations believe the benefits of event-driven distribution outweigh or are equal to the costs.
Understanding what an “event” is in this context may be helpful in completely understanding this term. Essentially, any action that produces a state change is called an event. It does not matter whether this change is simple or complex; once there is any change in the state, it is regarded as an event. This article will analyse the processes involved in an event-driven architecture and assess its benefits.
The Three Components of Event-Driven Architecture
There are three components in an event-driven architecture. This includes the event producer, the event broker or mediator (sometimes considered event retailer) and the event consumers. In the event producer state, the system focuses on the entity responsible for the event’s generation (generally, this is the API). It is this that will know that a state change has occurred and indicate so. Next, in the event broker stage, all interested parties in the event change are notified of its status in a similar fashion. The event consumer stage refers to the event being used for the consumer’s desires. To better understand the interconnected nature of this process, consider the following example in the context of a warehouse. A simple event change occurs when a package enters the factory. The very fact that a package has been entered is enough for the API (the entity) to issue an event change to all interested parties. Thus, the factory manager, production manager, and others will be notified that a package has arrived and can carry out any tasks related to the item. Other event changes include external sources, such as user inputs and internal sources, such as data sending for the pipeline work-chain and generation of outputs.
Models of Event-Driven Architectures
There are two types of event-driven architectures:
Publish-Subscribe (Pub/Sub) Model
A pub/sub model categorises the types of events that should be communicated to the consumer. In other words, it does not simply notify all state changes and will only send those that are part of the subscription. Hence, the pub/sub model is a messaging infrastructure based on subscriptions to an event stream. Thus, it is only after an event occurs or is published that the relevant subscribers are informed of it.
Event Streaming Model
In contrast to a pub/sub model, which provides the consumer to choose which events to be notified of, an event streaming model records state changes in a log. This log cannot be subscribed to, although it can be read from any part of the stream, and anyone can choose to join it at any time. There are three types of event streaming models, including event stream processing which can detect meaningful patterns; simple event processing, which immediately triggers an action in the event consumer and complex event processing, which requires the event consumer to process a series of state changes to detect patterns.
Benefits of Event-Driven Architectures
An event-driven architecture’s entire point is to understand each state changes value. Consequently, the quicker a company can receive information about events, the faster it can react to them in real time. This could be in terms of improving the consumer’s experience, shifting the focus of production or considering the reallocation of resources. Here are three benefits companies receive by incorporating an event-driven architecture.
Preparing for The Future
With the number of data that is provided through various technologies, including IoT, 5G, AI, ML and others, and the range of services a business receives, applications have to handle multiple state changes. A company can only take full advantage of such data only if the infrastructure can handle it. An event-driven architecture can process an enormous amount of data on the go, break down complex processes and feed in the correct information. Through this, accurate predictions can be made, giving the manager ample flexibility to take decisions to prevent any adverse results.
Push-Based Messaging
Conventional architectures have a pull-based format which requires a response to be given. On the other hand, event-driven systems allow for easy push-based messaging through a broker. Businesses, therefore, will not require to waste time writing codes to poll, filter, and route events and will automate this process and push events to the consumers. Consumers will thus receive updates without needing to poll. Moreover, since no coordination is required from the consumer’s end, the overall time taken is much faster in comparison to the lags in traditional architectures.
Robust Eventing System
While an event-driven architecture integrates all collected data, allowing the system to process event changes much more easily if any of the microservices connected malfunctions, it does not halt operations. Hence, the success of the architecture will not depend on all microservices’ functioning. Therefore, if one microservice stops working, the application will keep running. Those that failed, however, can be tracked by the company, and if required, the manager can replay events to assess why a specific event has failed. This way, managers can easily identify issues and rectify them without interrupting the organisation’s operations.
Cerexio Axion™ Real-time Event Broker Platform: An Ubiquitous API-friendly Data Platform
Cerexio Axion™ Real-time Event Broker Platform helps companies to transition from an old-age monolithic software developing platform to a new-age advanced platform. It is an all-inclusive event-driven system that allows managers to execute scalable and flexible microservices. Cerexio enables data practitioners to store, organise and route messages in real-time by partitioning data streams between customers. It can additionally act as a multifaceted platform whereby engineers can easily design software without problems whilst connecting to many standard open-ended protocols. It uses Publish & Subscribe (Pub-Sub) and routed Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) protocols to help data communication. You can easily connect your robotic fleet and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors to your application. It also boosts the functions of a typical manufacturing execution system, has adaptive streaming technology, and essentially allows you to adopt, commission, leverage, and control your company’s EDA with the most robust foundation.
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React To Your Business Problems with An Event-Driven Architecture
The direct disadvantage of not infusing event-driven architecture is that you will lack real-time data distribution. As a result, you may depend on the incorrect data when making important decisions. Where threats are not detected early, they could significantly impact your long-term operations, requiring you to incur and waste ample resources.
