Building Event-Driven Microservices

Chapter 1. Why Event-Driven Microservices

The medium is the message.

Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan argues that it is not the content of media, but rather engagement with its medium, that impacts humankind and introduces fundamental changes to society. Newspapers, radio, television, the internet, instant messaging, and social media have all changed human interaction and social structures thanks to our collective engagement.

The same is true with computer system architectures. You need only look at the history of computing inventions to see how network communications, relational databases, big-data developments, and cloud computing have significantly altered how architectures are built and how work is performed. Each of these inventions changed not only the way that technology was used within various software projects, but also the way that organizations, teams, and people communicated with one another. From centralized mainframes to distributed mobile applications, each new medium has fundamentally changed people’s relationship with computing.

The medium of the asynchronously produced and consumed event has been fundamentally shifted by modern technology. These events can now be persisted indefinitely, at extremely large scale, and be consumed by any service as many times as necessary. Compute resources can be easily acquired and released on-demand, enabling the easy creation and management of microservices. Microservices can store and manage their data according to their own needs, ...