Title: AWS re:Inforce 2024 - Building resilient event-driven architectures, feat. United Airlines (DAP301)

Insights:

• Event-Driven Architecture Popularity: Event-driven architectures are gaining traction due to their ability to meet modern business requirements such as speed, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. They facilitate the decomposition of monolithic applications into microservices, which can scale independently and be deployed frequently.
• Decomposition Patterns: The strangler pattern is highlighted as a popular method for modernizing existing systems by incrementally replacing parts of a monolith with microservices on AWS, eventually decommissioning the old system.
• Advantages of Microservices: Microservices offer scalability, independent deployment, reduced dependencies, and increased resiliency by being modeled around business domains and exposed via APIs.
• Event-Driven Architecture Fundamentals: These architectures consist of producers and consumers of events, with message brokers in between to handle event storage, routing, and processing. Key patterns include event stores, pub-sub, and event routers.
• AWS Messaging Services: AWS offers native services like Amazon SQS, SNS, and EventBridge, as well as managed open-source services like Amazon MQ and Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK), which are integral to building event-driven architectures.
• Governance and Resiliency: Effective governance involves infrastructure choices, access controls, and change management. Micro-account architectures enhance security and resource isolation, while multi-region architectures ensure business resiliency.
• Data Protection in EDA: Data protection is crucial, involving encryption in transit, at rest, and client-side encryption. AWS KMS is a key service for managing cryptographic keys, and the AWS Encryption SDK simplifies encryption implementation.
• United Airlines Transformation: United Airlines is transitioning from a mainframe to an event-driven architecture to handle increased traffic and complexity. They use a strangler pattern for gradual migration and have developed a reference architecture to streamline the process.
• Key Requirements and Patterns: United Airlines handles millions of flights and seat map views daily, necessitating scalable and resilient systems. They employ various EDA patterns like pub-sub, context injection, and failure handling to maintain data integrity and system stability.

Quotes:

• "As our business partners are telling us to go faster, be more reliable, less defects and be more cost-effective."
• "Strangler pattern is where you will extract a particular functionality and modernize it into a system which is on AWS."
• "If any application which is modern, cloud-native, distributed, and it does not have a messaging layer in between, well, that's probably a bug."
• "Event-driven architectures are becoming more and more accessible."
• "We have very limited talent available in the market to work on these mainframe projects and this hinders our pace of innovation."
• "United loves to own its destiny. We don't hesitate to build the software if the capability does not exist in the market."
• "Our event-driven architecture is the key enabler for resilient PSS systems, and the data generated from the PSS system is fueling innovative capabilities, enhancing your travel experience."