Event-driven architecture

EDA decouples services by communicating via asynchronous events (e.g., 'Order Placed'), enabling real-time, scalable reactions across distributed systems using a central broker like Apache Kafka or AWS EventBridge.

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) is the blueprint for modern, distributed systems. It operates on three components: event producers, event brokers, and event consumers. Producers publish a record of a state change—an *event*—like a user clicking 'submit order.' This event flows asynchronously through a central broker (e.g., Google Pub/Sub, Amazon SNS/SQS) to all interested consumers. This loose coupling ensures services operate independently, dramatically improving fault tolerance and scalability. For instance, a single 'Payment Processed' event can simultaneously trigger 3+ downstream actions: updating inventory, sending a customer email notification, and logging data for analytics. This model minimizes dependencies and maximizes throughput.

https://cloud.google.com/eventarc/docs/event-driven-architectures