Event-driven architecture (EDA) is an approach that contrasts with service-oriented architecture (SOA), which typically uses APIs for client-driven, request-response interactions. EDA involves sending and receiving events to facilitate asynchronous processing, enabling components to react to events as they arrive, reducing physical and temporal coupling between services. This approach promotes a subscribe-and-parallel-processing model, where applications have simple relationships between components, with producers sending events to multiple consumers, managed by an event broker or middleware component. EDA offers several advantages over SOA, including reduced coupling, higher resilience, and better support for consistency between process interaction and internal state management. It also allows for the retention of exact state transitions, enabling analytics to derive insight from customer behavior. Ultimately, the choice between SOA and EDA depends on what is being tried to achieve and the problems being solved, with EDA offering a more connected central nervous system-like experience.