Building Event-Driven Microservices, 2nd Edition

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, data storage technology, and cloud computing have significantly altered the architectures we build and the systems we use. The continual improvement and innovation of these technologies not only have changed how we build our products and businesses but have had a profound impact on how our organizations, teams, and people communicate with one another. From centralized mainframes to distributed mobile applications, each new medium has fundamentally changed our relationship with computing, and with it, the relationships of our services with one another.

What Are Event-Driven Microservices?

Microservices and microservice-style architectures have been around for many years, in many different forms, under many different names. Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are often composed of multiple microservices synchronously communicating directly with one another. Message-passing architectures use consumable ...