Event-Driven Architecture and Agile Engineering

Like microservices, event-driven architecture is becoming a key architectural and, dare we say, business pattern. Modern and agile engineering teams in large and small enterprises are using EDA to accelerate the digital transformation of their businesses.

This post covers how EDA affects the teams tasked with accelerating and structuring massive digital transformations, the challenges around agile teams (like scaling and organizational silos), and the technology solutions that make it all easier.

Agile Engineering and Event-Driven Architecture

Modern and agile engineering teams are using event-driven architecture to accelerate the digital transformation of their businesses as evidenced by the fact that Gartner inquiries have risen by 90% between 2019 and mid 2021¹. Aside from the architectural and strategic impacts of event-driven architecture, it also affects the agility of software development teams. Conway’s law is often referenced as how an organization’s design influences the design of the systems we build:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”

We would argue that the reverse is also true, i.e., that the systems –and in this case the architectural pattern– impacts how parts of the organization work together. The key objectives of using event-driven architecture from a technology point of view are decoupling of location, improving availability, and accelerating the responsiveness of system components.

Loosely Coupled Development Teams – A Benefit of EDA

One of the biggest benefits of event-driven architecture from an organizational standpoint is that it leads to loosely coupled development teams. For example, you can have agile software development teams each build their components independently while still collaborating at the API and payload level using tools such as an event portal. This loose coupling is facilitated by clearly defined event-driven APIs (applications programming interfaces) that abstract out the internals of the services created by each team.

Using event-driven APIs and the publish/subscribe message exchange pattern enables teams to choreograph the actions of microservices instead of orchestrating them. The choreography approach enables new teams to deliver business applications without being dependent on other teams’ deliverables and timelines.

Microservices Choreography vs Orchestration: The Benefits of ChoreographyChoosing between microservices choreography vs orchestration will affect how microservices will communicate with one another behind the scenes.Read Post

Accelerating Digital Transformation with Agile and Autonomous Teams

The loose coupling discussed above makes teams more agile and allows the business to accelerate digital transformation by increasing investment and having the ability to add new engineering/app teams to the organizations that can plug-and-play their new components independently.

Using the right technology –such as an event mesh, which gives each team their own event broker services around the world– is another agility enabler that cannot be overlooked. Instead of coordinating access to a central message bus as with traditional integration approaches, development teams can stand up and manage their own event broker using the CI/CD technology of their choice. This infrastructure autonomy allows teams to decide their go-live, service windows, and release schedules.

Eliminating Organizational Silos with Technology

While using an event mesh breaks down silos by allowing teams to contribute to and use the event streams at will, greater results can be achieved with the addition of an event portal as the event management layer of the overall event-driven architecture platform. As an example, Solace’s PubSub+ Event Portal enables teams to catalog all available events and expose event API products so that all autonomous and independent teams (including external partners) can discover the existing events and tap into the power of an event mesh.

Only by both loosely coupling and breaking down silos can an organization move full speed ahead by identifying the business opportunities and use cases that will improve the customer experience and grow their business.

Conclusion

By adopting event-driven architecture, enterprises can increase their ability to deliver new applications and services by enabling multiple independent teams to work in parallel – all while avoiding the silo effect that often accompanies such methods of delivery. A robust messaging platform like PubSub+ is a key component of the infrastructure necessary to succeed.

1. Source: Gartner “How to identify your Event-Driven Architecture Use Cases to Select the Best-Fit Event Broker”, 27 July 2021, Keith Guttridge, Roy Schulte