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.
What is 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.
Event Sourcing is a advanced concept that sits in the Distributed Systems Core 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 Sourcing" 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.
CQRS
Command Query Responsibility Segregation: using different models for reading and writing data. Reads and writes have different performance needs, so separate them.
Kafka
A distributed event streaming platform that handles millions of events per second. Used by LinkedIn, Netflix, and Uber for real-time data pipelines.
Saga Pattern
A way to manage distributed transactions across microservices using a sequence of local transactions with compensating actions for rollback.