Event-driven architecture is a shit show - It’s time to fix it

Reflecting on event-driven architecture, it's problems and what needs to change.

I’m sat in the back of a taxi coming back from NDC Copenhagen, after giving my talk Navigating complexity in event-driven architectures: A domain-driven approach , and reflecting on another great conference, connecting with folks building event-driven architectures at scale, and listening to all their shared problems.

Over the past 10 years I’ve been diving deep into event-driven architectures, building them, advocating for them, writing books about them, and building tools around them. And it’s sad to see that many companies face the same issues…. versioning, standards, discoverability, designing, shared understanding, understanding technical trade offs, schema changes, developing big balls of distributed mud… and the list goes on.

Folks are sold the pipe dream of distributed, loosely coupled systems, they take services of the shelf from providers or cloud giants and start to “build event driven architectures”. The barrier to entry is low (more than ever). Developers start their event-driven journey with a simple SDK call (publishing a message) into a service (e.g Azure EventGrid, Google PubSub, Amazon SQS etc), and connecting a consumer, but this is where the problems start.

It has become so “easy” to connect systems, we forget to design the system in the first place and build guardrails to help in the future.

Almost all companies I have spoken too (100s if not 1000s) are having problems. From failing to understand what events they have, how to version them, duplicating effort in their organization, and developing some form of ball of distributed mud. Simple guardrails and practices are ignored leading to huge frustration….

I feel the eco-system has let us down in certain areas that are often ignored… (design, discoverability, ownership to name a few….). And I feel we can do better.

The good news, coming away from NDC I feel more focused than ever.

I believe we can do better. I believe we shouldn't settle for the shit we naturally inherit building event-driven architectures, and it’s time to explore, innovate and make it better for everyone.

I have refocused my north star for EventCatalog, to build open source tools, practices and community to help this eco-system. I know we can do better, so let’s make it happen.

I may succeed or fail on this journey, but we have to try something! And I’m super excited to make this become a reality.

If you are interested in following along, helping out or getting involved, feel free to join over 1,100 members on EventCatalog Discord! Let’s GO!