How Storyblocks Enabled a New Class of Event-Driven Microservices with Confluent

Storyblocks, a media company founded in 2009, had to modernize its monolithic application by splitting it into microservices, which led to scaling challenges and technical debt. To address these issues, they adopted Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud, which enabled them to reduce technical debt and improve data visibility. By using Kafka as an event-driven architecture, Storyblocks was able to create a single pipeline for all their data and communication between services, reducing complexity and improving scalability. With Confluent Cloud's managed service, they could focus on business-critical tasks rather than managing Kafka clusters. The company's experience highlights the importance of defining boundaries, refactoring applications, using Kafka as an event bus, and saving data to create a successful microservices architecture.