Introduction to event-driven architecture

Event-driven architecture (EDA) is an alternative approach to building microservice applications, offering a decoupled system of producers and consumers that process events asynchronously through an intermediary called a broker. This contrasts with the traditional request-response pattern used in computing and web applications, where a client makes a synchronous HTTP request and waits for a response from the server. EDA's benefits include high decoupling between producers and consumers, asynchronous interactions, and fault tolerance due to independent functioning of services. Key components of EDA include events, event records, producers, consumers, streams, message brokers, event schemas, and various patterns such as notification about state change, replication of state, and event collaboration. Apache Kafka is a popular open-source message broker for implementing EDA due to its scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance.