The Architect’s Guide to Event-Driven Microservices

Event-driven microservices give you the power to quickly create and modify components in a way that offers bottom-line business value, which is mission critical in a world where your competitors are a click away and time to market is everything.

What’s not to love, right?

But the speed with which you develop components is just one piece of the puzzle.

• How quickly can you integrate them with the rest of your system?
• How completely can you embrace innovative new techniques and technologies?

In my new whitepaper for architects, The Architects’s Guide to Event-Driven Microservices, I explain the benefits of combining event-driven architecture and microservices and how decomposing applications admittedly makes life a little more… interesting.

Breaking monolithic applications into distributed components introduces many complexities and challenges associated with a set of incorrect assumptions referred to as The Fallacies of Distributed Computing.

Simply put, many developers assume that the network used to establish communications between components is homogenous, reliable, real-time, unchanging, etc.

This isn’t the case, of course, so you need to overcome inherent unpredictability and variances in the connectivity layer through smart coding, smart architecture, and smart connectivity.

I also explain how to bake all of this “smartness” into your system so you can avoid falling victim to predictable pitfalls and failed techniques.

And I explore how this event-driven approach allows enterprise architects to evolve from inflexible orchestration to choreography:

Design your system by describing what roles you want each microservice to play, and set them up to act as independent players, adapting to unpredictable inputs in such a way that business gets done, customers get satisfied, and you get to rest easy knowing your infrastructure is reactive and rock-solid.

I hope you enjoy The Architect’s Guide to Event-Driven Microservices, and I welcome your feedback!

Jonathan Schabowsky

Field CTO

As Solace’s Field CTO, Jonathan helps companies understand how they can capitalize on the use of event-driven architecture to make the most of their microservices, and deploy event-driven applications into platform-as-a-services (PaaS) environments running in cloud and on-prem environments. He is an expert at architecting large-scale, mission critical enterprise systems, with over a decade of experience designing, building and managing them in domains such as air traffic management (FAA), satellite ground systems (GOES-R), and healthcare.

Based on that experience with the practical application of EDA and messaging technologies, and some painful lessons learned along the way, Jonathan conceived and has helped spearhead Solace’s efforts to create powerful new tools that help companies more easily manage enterprise-scale event-driven systems, including the company’s new event management product: PubSub+ Event Portal.

Jonathan is highly regarded as a speaker on the subject of event-driven architecture, having given presentations as part of SpringOne, Kafka Summit, and API Specs conferences. Jonathan holds a BS Computer Science, Florida State University, and in his spare time he enjoys spending time with his family and skiing the world-class slopes of Utah where he lives.

See all posts written by Jonathan Schabowsky