Applications have quickly become complex webs of interconnected microservices. Failures in the API calls between microservices grow more common and far more dastardly – wreaking havoc throughout applications in unforeseen ways. Accidents and errors can happen even with the most brilliant engineers and most controlled environments in the world. Unfortunately, this means that outright elimination of API call failures is not an option. Instead, we have to prepare our applications for failure, and this is where event-driven architecture comes into play.
If you’ve worked with or researched microservices in the last decade, chances are you’ve heard of and probably implemented event-driven architecture. The pattern has become extraordinarily popular amongst cloud-native and distributed teams in recent years as it solves some very real problems with fault tolerance, availability, and coupling of microservices. Instead of communicating directly with one another through API calls, services publish and subscribe to events. In doing so, both the publisher and subscriber can exist and perform their work regardless of the other’s availability, thus achieving the fault tolerance needed for the application to support a growing number of users.
This all sounds like a nice silver bullet on the surface, but what even is an event, and do you leverage event-driven design in an application? In this article, I’ll discuss the different uses of events, the various technologies and practices that can broker events, and the risks involved with event-driven architecture. I’ll even debunk a few myths about event-driven design to boot!
Types of events
Events are used to communicate with other applications and services – it’s that simple. There’s a lot of thought that can go into which events you publish, who subscribes to them, and what contents go inside the event, but none of that matters when it comes to describing what an event is and what it can be used for. What matters is whether or not your event needs a response. Is your event just miscellaneous information that you’re making available for other applications to do whatever they want with, or are you using your event to request additional information from a peer app or service?
Broadcast notifications
For those of you who still watch live TV, you’re probably aware of the fact that others can tune into and out of the same channel as you at the same time, and they’ll see the same content you do. In fact, the content doesn’t change, no matter how many people tune in or out of the channel. Whether a hundred or a million people are watching, your favorite sportscaster is still going to be saying the same thing to everyone who tunes in.
Broadcast application events work the same way as broadcast media – the event gets published by a single entity but can be received by unlimited subscribers. Since the publisher isn’t expecting any kind of response from subscribers, they can continue their broadcast regardless of the number of viewers on the other end.
Broadcast events play a critical role in distributed applications, especially for core services like identity management and payments services. These services use events to communicate with the rest of the application whenever actions are taken, or important state changes are made. A reporting service may want to forecast new financial projections whenever payments are processed, or a shipping service may wish to change delivery targets whenever a user updates their primary residence. The identity and payments services don’t care what others do with the information, but they know that other services may want to tune in for updates to act on critical information for themselves.
Action/response events
Broadcast events are great when we don’t care who the subscribers are or what they intend to do with the event information, but they don’t help us make regular API calls more fault-tolerant, as described earlier. Many direct API calls not only know which service it is being made to, but the response from the service they are connecting to is of great importance. Maybe we need to check the identity service to make sure the user has 2FA enabled before they can wire money, or maybe we need to query the product catalog for the latest prices before adding an item to the shopping cart. These are pervasive and intuitive thoughts and workflows for developers and applications, but how would a developer go about instrumenting this flow using event-driven architecture?
The answer lies with Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) – a pattern involving the separation of workflows and data structures for reading and writing information respectively. Instead of relying on a single event, which is limited to sharing information from publisher to subscriber, developers would use two events to replicate their API calls using event-driven design: one for the upstream service to trigger an action and another for the downstream service to respond. As long as the downstream knows the name of the action event and the upstream knows the name of the response event, they can subscribe to each other to fulfill the bi-directional request.
This action/response event style has become increasingly popular in recent years. It allows developers to replace API call flows with near-identical event-driven flows, but swapping to events outright comes with its own set of hurdles. With direct API calls, developers get to store application state in memory while they await a response from the downstream API. Events, on the other hand, require state to be stored and accessible in a more persistent manner. With events, there’s no guarantee that the same instance that published the action event will receive the response event. As a result, event-driven architectures often demand more thought around session management and persistence to maintain state between action/response events.
Event-driven application brokers
We’ve talked a lot about how events make applications fault-tolerant since they don’t have to wait for subscribers, but how does that functionally work? What magic is it that allows these events to “complete” even when the subscribers are down or otherwise unavailable? The answer is surprisingly simple – events get stored in a database.
Yes, you really can store your events in just about anything that can persist the events. It’s the fact that the events are persisted that enables fault-tolerance. If a subscriber isn’t ready for the event just yet, either because it’s busy handling another event or it crashed, the event remains in the database until the subscriber comes back up.
This database could be something as raw as the filesystem, or you can dump them right into a MySQL or PostgreSQL database you already have available. That said, there is an abundance of database software explicitly designed to handle events. These database solutions are often referred to as brokers due to the way they mediate the relationship between event publishers and subscribers. There are several different brands and solutions you can select, but before you dive right into the brands themselves, you’ll need to decide which brokering style is best for your application:
Queue-backed brokers
If you’ve done any research into event-driven architecture, you’ve probably also heard of the word “message queue.” Message queues are one of the two ways that event brokers can store and enable subscription to published events. Publishers simply write their event to a queue, and a subscriber can pop the events off of said queue when it’s ready to be processed. Action/response events are straightforward to operate and integrate with: events don’t stay on the queue forever, which means that the database can remain generally small, and integration with it is relatively intuitive to developers who already understand the concept of a queue.
The downside of queue-backed brokers, however, is that multiple subscribers can’t consume messages. Once a subscriber claims a message from a queue, the message is gone and unable to be consumed by a different subscriber. This means that to distribute a notification to multiple subscribers, a publisher has to write the message to multiple queues – one for each subscriber.
Fortunately, this isn’t as difficult as it sounds with modern brokers. Some solutions, like RabbitMQ, natively support the notion of topics which allow you to publish once and have the broker handle the writing to multiple queues. Other solutions, like AWS SQS, have sister services like SNS that can connect to SQS to write to multiple queues as well.
Event streams
The competitive methodology for storing and subscribing to events is through a persistent event stream, like that seen in Apache Kafka. In this model, events are stored permanently in an ordered list and are never popped off like a queuing system. This means that multiple subscribers can read the same message. It also means that it’s up to subscribers to keep track of which event was the last one they read in. Subscribers can join the stream at different times, reprocess historical events, and generally control their destiny. This can also place more responsibility on each subscriber, making it more difficult for developers to rationalize.
Myths about event-driven architecture
Event-driven architecture is clearly a powerful way to protect distributed systems from inevitable failure. Still, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what an event is and what value it provides back to an application.
Event-driven architecture decouples microservices
Developers are readily taught that event-driven architecture “decouples” microservices from one another, allowing each service to run separately from each other without crashing. While it’s true that these services can now run without crashing, is a subscriber of an event doing anything of substance if the publisher isn’t running or isn’t available?
Without the events being published, a subscribing service is generally left idling, burning compute power waiting for an event to come in. It may not crash, but it certainly isn’t doing anything useful. Don’t get me wrong, the fact that it’s not crashing is enormously important for fault tolerance in production environments. However, the application architecture still has dependencies – subscribing services are still dependent on event publishers to do meaningful work and provide value back to end-users.
It’s essential to capture these events and relationships if teams are to better understand what their applications are doing. This understanding helps with tracing and debugging requests and allows for topology maps to be generated, analyzed, and used to educate developers on where and how to contribute new features effectively.
Events are asynchronous
Another myth about events is that they are de facto asynchronous – publishers don’t wait for subscribers and vice-versa and will begin processing if and when they eventually hear from each other. While this is true of the two types of brokers we outlined in this article, which are the two main types used in event-driven architectures, it is not the nature of an event that makes this true, but rather the fact that we are using databases to persist events and broker the relationships.
The usage of a database to broker events is not a requirement. You’ve most certainly heard of an event type that does not use a database to broker events, webhooks. Webhooks involve subscribers registering themselves with event publishers directly, and events that the publisher ships out are done using direct, synchronous API calls. This is identical to a “broadcast” event like we described earlier but highlights that it’s the database usage that provides fault tolerance rather than event-driven architecture itself.
You could even intercept synchronous API calls and force the calls onto a message broker to get this same fault tolerance for direct API calls between microservices. Instrumentation of this is wildly impractical, which is why it’s seldom done, but even its possibility further highlights that persistence is the secret sauce behind event-driven architecture.
Enabling event-driven architecture for your application
Event-driven architecture is powerful, but implementation leaves a lot to be desired – specifically when it comes to understanding the relationships between services whose communication is managed by a message broker or event stream. At Architect.io, we strive to make it as easy as possible for developers to incorporate best-in-breed architecture, like event streaming, into their everyday workflows. By automating service discovery and network security with each deployment, developers can more easily and more safely build event-driven design into their applications. Check out some of our other articles to learn more:
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