Event-Driven Architecture Maturity Assessment
If at all, event notifications are only processed
for a single, specific use case
At this maturity stage, it's common for IT architects, developers and data scientists to describe their organization’s approach to event-driven architectures as:
Description
At this stage, architects, data engineers and developers are struggling with moving data around an organization to deliver required business functionality.
Legacy core systems that have grown around entrenched, key business processes, three-tier architecture and simple point-to-point connections lead to a high level of complexity. In most organizations, legacy architecture has become a tightly coupled, complex and rigid ecosystem.
Recommended Action
Encourage experimentation. Early experience with event processing begins to show application architects and business users the potential advantages and special capabilities of event-driven design.
Good resources on the general benefits of EDA Architecture and where to start include Software Architecture Patterns by Mark Richards, the Confluent blog series on Journey to Event-Driven, and a blog series by tiempo development on Event-Driven Architectures.
Description
Most teams can easily identify one or more bottlenecks, where batch processing cannot keep up with rising data volumes and the business is suffering as a result. Sometimes EDA-capable middleware (like message-oriented middleware or an enterprise service bus) is present but used mostly for general data passing and integration.
Recommended Action
Eliminate your greatest choke points, for example, by converting legacy extract, transform, load (ETL) to change data capture (CDC) or Kafka streaming.
Keep things simple with this first project, focusing on just a few endpoints that can be integrated without custom work.
Easing the pain in this way clears room for higher data volumes and velocities. It eliminates delays and creates new real-time possibilities for business data consumers. It also establishes a quick win that you can use to gain resources for additional projects.
Description
Although there is a growing awareness of EDA and the way in which it can help reduce complexity, the lack of experience or tools for development complicates and slows adoption.
Gaps in knowledge or the lack of access to tools that are easy to learn surface adoption challenges, including end-to-end testing and design for exceptions. In the absence of expert skills and advanced business-oriented tools, some projects disappoint, delaying further adoption.
Recommended Action
For an early stage company, we recommend starting off with simple use cases on an easy-to-learn platform. We have compiled a collection of interesting use cases around event streams built on Xapix, so you can get first-hand experience and craft use cases on your own!