Architecture Event Driven

Overview

Use this skill to design event-driven systems that remain correct under retries, delays, and partial failures.

Scope Boundaries

• Workflows span multiple bounded contexts or services asynchronously.
• Temporal decoupling is needed to improve autonomy or resilience.
• Integration churn is high and direct RPC coupling causes fragility.

Core Judgments

• Event semantics: fact versus command and ownership of meaning.
• Delivery guarantees: at-most-once, at-least-once, effectively-once patterns.
• Ordering strategy: global ordering, per-key ordering, or order independence.
• Recovery model: replay, dead-letter, compensating actions, and backfill.

Practitioner Heuristics

• Publish events as immutable domain facts from the source of truth.
• Never rely on “exactly-once” assumptions; design idempotent consumers.
• Partition keys must align with business consistency boundaries.
• Version event contracts with additive evolution first; reserve breaking changes for controlled migrations.

Workflow

1. Define domain events and ownership boundaries.
2. Specify producer guarantees and consumer idempotency requirements.
3. Choose ordering and partitioning strategies by business invariant.
4. Design failure-handling paths for retry storms, poison messages, and replay.
5. Align observability with event lifecycle (published, consumed, failed, compensated).
6. Document contract evolution and deprecation strategy.

Common Failure Modes

• Events used as remote procedure calls in disguise.
• Shared event schema controlled by consumers instead of producers.
• Unbounded retry loops causing downstream saturation.

Failure Conditions

• Stop when event ownership or semantics are ambiguous.
• Stop when consumer correctness depends on fragile global ordering.
• Escalate when replay/compensation behavior is undefined for critical flows.