by Horatiu Dan

Event driven architectures have been successfully used for quite an amount of time by a lot of organizations in various business cases. They excel at performance, scalability, evolvability and fault-tolerance providing a good level of abstraction and elasticity. These strengths made them good choices when applications needed real or near real-time reactiveness.

In terms of implementations, for standard messaging, ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ are good candidates, while for data streaming, platforms as Apache Kafka and Redpanda are more suitable. Usually, when developers and architects need to opt for either one of these two directions they analyze and weight from a bunch of angles – message payload, flow and usage of data, throughput, solution topology. As the discussion around these aspects can get too big and complex, it is not going to be refined as part of this article.

Conceptually, event driven architectures involve a...