Event-Driven Architecture
A design pattern where services communicate by producing and consuming events rather than making direct calls. Promotes loose coupling and asynchronous processing.
What is Event-Driven Architecture?
A design pattern where services communicate by producing and consuming events rather than making direct calls. Promotes loose coupling and asynchronous processing.
Event-Driven Architecture is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the Messaging & Event Systems area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Event-Driven Architecture" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Pub/Sub
A messaging pattern where publishers send messages to topics, and subscribers receive messages from topics they care about. Publishers don't know who's listening.
Kafka
A distributed event streaming platform that handles millions of events per second. Used by LinkedIn, Netflix, and Uber for real-time data pipelines.
Event Sourcing
Storing every state change as an immutable event instead of just the current state. You can rebuild any past state by replaying events.