Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Advanced event-driven patterns with Amazon EventBridge (COM301-R)

Summary

• Introduction to event-driven architecture (EDA) and its importance, with a focus on Amazon EventBridge.
• Discussion on the basics of EDA, including the roles of producers, consumers, brokers, and events.
• Explanation of EventBridge's core components: event buses, producers, consumers, and filtering/routing rules.
• Overview of serverless architecture growth and the challenges of tangled event-driven architectures.
• Introduction to EventBridge features and best practices for structuring events, including domain, operational, internal, and transformed events.
• Detailed exploration of event-driven patterns, including choreography, functionless integration, API destinations, circuit breaker pattern, archive and replay, orchestration with task tokens, and the gatekeeper pattern.
• Addressing common questions about EventBridge, such as the number of event buses needed, when to use EventBridge vs. Kinesis, and comparisons with SQS and SNS.
• Emphasis on the importance of understanding asynchrony and event-driven concepts for modern serverless architectures.

Insights

• EventBridge plays a crucial role in decoupling microservices and facilitating event-driven architectures, allowing for independent deployment and scalability.
• The speaker emphasizes the importance of designing events carefully, advocating for structured events with clear metadata and data sections.
• The functionless integration pattern is highlighted as a way to reduce unnecessary custom code by leveraging native integrations and services like API Gateway and Step Functions.
• API destinations in EventBridge are a powerful feature for invoking external targets without writing custom functions, with EventBridge handling the associated costs.
• The circuit breaker pattern is essential for building resilient applications, and EventBridge Archive and Replay offers a mechanism for handling event failures and retries.
• Orchestration with AWS Step Functions and task tokens is a powerful pattern for managing complex workflows across multiple services and domains.
• The gatekeeper pattern is recommended for managing cross-boundary events, ensuring that only relevant domain events are shared externally.
• The speaker suggests that while EventBridge, Kinesis, SQS, and SNS have overlapping functionalities, each service has unique characteristics that make it suitable for specific use cases.
• The talk concludes with a reminder to complete a survey, indicating the importance of feedback for continuous improvement.