Using Event Driven Architecture to Improve your Software Applications

Online applications have undergone a drastic change that used to serve HTML content from the right server. These days, applications have become a bit complex. And, they use the latest technologies, data centers, and different types of frameworks. The IT market saw two major changes.

One, apps began to move to the cloud, and another, implementing a different type of microservices architecture. It helped software developers a lot. Also, it has changed the concept of how they design and create software. Now, they build platforms instead of developing applications. In this article, you get an insight into how event driven architecture helps improve software applications.

What are the issues faced by a modern web?

Every technology that you come across has to go through certain challenges and these are quite important. Here they are explained in brief.

  • Availability – It is good to run many of the linked services instead of a single application. Also, each of them has to be ready 24×7 to do the job. But how to do that? Most services are scaled horizontally across different data centers to make many instances of your service.

That makes the application highly available. Moreover, the requests that come from particular services are routed through different instances. Also, some development tools have self-healing abilities. It means, if one instance fails to operate, it creates another instance that runs in its absence.

  • Scalability – It is very much similar to availability. While availability makes sure that at least one instance should be running whenever there are incoming requests, scalability is more focused on performance.

Somehow if any application becomes overloaded, then the system can create new instances of the application. That way, the app can accommodate more requests. However, scaling up an application is not free of challenges. And, it becomes more challenging when you have to deal with stateful applications.

  • The only source of truth – Before microservices came into existence, the data used to reside in a single place. It was like a relational database. When many services share a database, issues such as dependencies between teams for schema may change or other performance issues might evolve. However, the best way to resolve the issue is to utilize a specific database per service. An elaborate source of truth can help to maintain a clean architecture.
  • Synchronous – In a common request-response scenario, the user has to wait for the server and respond. And, it tends to block all the activities until the timeout expires or it receives a response. If this behavior is put in a microservices architecture by using chained cells all over the system, it can result in what is called “Microservices Hell”.

Introduction of event driven architecture

To begin with, an event-driven architecture is a system of a couple of microservices that tend to exchange certain information between each other through consumption and production of events. It’s more like software paradigms where a system generates messages to be distributed over an event-driven ecosystem. After that, it broadcasts to whatever services are interested in receiving them.

What are the approaches toward software modernization?

Whenever legacy systems try to hold back growth in a business, the IT teams begin to modernize existing solutions and creates a new business value for them. The process might include rewriting code, migrating to another platform, altering the architecture, and even replacing the whole system.

While there are a few ways to modernize legacy software, the only things needed to create a strong foundation are architecture, infrastructure, and lastly, the delivery cycle. This is the best way to develop a scalable solution. All these things are silent components that help you create a scalable product that runs for a longer time.

When it comes to defining software architecture, it is how the components of a whole software system are organized. Also, it is about how they interact with each other and other constraints. Depending on a few aspects, software architectures can be developed for a unique solution.

When software development becomes scalable and complex, it is wise to create software with a specific architecture that helps to keep the services and functions independent. That’s the reason why the software development industry experienced a massive change from the monolith to microservices architecture.

For creating scalable software that will be deployed, it is recommended to modernize the apps with microservices architecture. So, updating the architecture should be the right step when a company thinks about modernizing its software architecture.

What is the importance of event-driven architecture in this new era of technology?

There is no question that new generation digital leaders have improved their capabilities of remaining to be more competitive. And, many of them have accomplished success by leveraging event-driven architecture. This approach maximizes the benefits derived from microservices. In short, it is a software development program to integrate another system through events.

Events are built to establish communication between systems and applications. An event is a change in state or any kind of occurrence that is identified by that specific application. Adding a product to the cart when shopping from an online store is a perfect example of an event.

An app that is designed as a producer, can detect the event and sends relevant data to another part of the system in the form of messages. Moreover, an event processor, allows the message to reach a designated place called the consumer. Also, multiple consumers can receive the message.

And, they can process the data in their way. That way, the app accomplishes the job for which it was designed. Today’s app development relies on revolutionary technologies such as cloud-native or microservices. They make different types of applications and systems possible.

What event-driven architecture looks like in the real world?

One of the promising aspects of event driven architecture is that it fits perfectly in the real world. In short, it supports a variety of applications that are needed in the digital economy. It is the perfect architecture for enterprise applications that tend to receive benefits from real-time and scalable communication from data integration, website activity tracking, and stream processing.

  • Data integration – Certain applications that take care of processing various types of data from different sources. Event-driven architecture presents it in a unified view. Also, data integration apps provide support for a variety of industries with updated, accurate, and accessible information.

Moreover, it can process streams of events needed for real-time monitoring and analyzing the same. One good example of a data integration that builds upon event-driven architecture is a dashboard that delivers the latest trends to consumers while saving the data for later analysis.

  • Website activity tracking – Event-driven architecture help developers to build applications that can monitor user activity on different websites. These applications provide a company with website performance and consumer activity. From ad clicks to page views, all kinds of interactions would be processed by the architecture.

For a Company, these insights reflect a consumer’s interest and trigger automated suggestions for specific services or products based on the consumer’s needs. Moreover, the data is sent for analysis to other apps to forecast future demands.

  • Stream processing – Event-driven architecture enables developers to create apps to process and transform different streams of real-time events. A stream is a flow of events that are sent from different producers to consumers. The advantages include scaling large amounts of data and ensuring the lines of communication remain open.

A good example is that stream processing works great with Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring. The IoT depends on machine learning microservices. They process events in a certain order and enable the proactive repair system and replacement of critical devices before they cause harm to the system.

What does event-driven architecture deliver?

There are lots of valuable business advantages that users can derive from applications based on event-driven architecture.

  • Real-time speed – It enables the users to view and examine the business real quick and in real-time to the constantly changing market. Event-driven architecture is important to connect and maintain connectivity with external partners, stakeholders, consumers, and suppliers.
  • Low latency – In today’s digital world, most applications work by accessing the data instantly. So, when the point-to-point integrations used to share data are minimized, event-driven architecture can streamline the required interactions and reduce latency to a fraction of a second.
  • Helps in informed decision making – When there is real-time event processing, event-driven architecture helps to deliver critically, updated, and accurate information that your users might need to make an effective business decision.
  • Data scalability – Event-driven architecture can help developers built highly scalable apps. These apps can handle a massive amount of data needed for analytics daily. Also, it provides the flexibility to scale the business quickly depending on the needs.
  • Reliable operation – Event-driven architecture ensures reliable operation, communication, and mitigating service downtime. What happens in the synchronous model is that services have to be available and responsive to communicate. If the service isn’t available, the whole system might collapse.

With event-driven architecture, apps don’t need a reply and are asynchronous. It means the events could be processed later if the service isn’t available right now, or busy. Moreover, the services are decoupled in the event-driven architecture model. So, if a service goes down, it doesn’t impact other services within the chain.


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