Serverless Craic Ep31 Event Driven Architecture Examples at EDA Day

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

We are talking about Event Driven Architecture examples today. There was an event in London a few weeks ago, called EDA Day. It was organised by GOTO with a lot of AWS contributors. It was neat because it was one day focused on event driven architectures. It showed the coming together of a 15 to 20 year old pattern of EDA, plus serverless. And all the bigger services on top of that, like Eventbridge and Step Functions.

Gregor Hohpe's Keynote

Gregor Hohpe did the keynote talk: 'I made everything loosely coupled. Does my app fall apart?' Gregor is an AWS enterprise strategist. And he talked about the event landscape and the complexities behind event driven and architecture. He had a diagram called: 'A calls B'. It looked pretty simple until you get to the million things you need to think about when A calls B!

He said that there were three languages in a cloud native serverless domain.

1. The business domain and how you talk about the business domain as a business person.
2. The eventing architecture and how you talk about it as an architect.
3. And the cloud native area, and how you talk about it as a cloud engineer.

So DDD, event framework and CDK for automation. It's about having those three separate languages and how you talk. And bringing them together at the end.

Serverless Espresso

And one neat thing to mention is a developer advocate called Julian Wood. He's worth looking up on Twitter. He, Ben Smith, and a few others from Serverless Land, put together a demo called Serverless Espresso. You scan a barcode and through an event driven step function, event bridge sequence, you can order a coffee from your phone. It looks and sounds really simple. But you watch the whole thing happen. That's a great lab. So look up AWS labs, to see Serverless Espresso. It's well put together to show how you build an event driven architecture from the ground up.

Ben Ellerby - Minimal Viable Migrations

Another good speaker was Ben Ellerby. He worked in Theodo and is an AWS Serverless Hero. He has a thing about Minimal Viable Migrations. A lot of people think event driven is a greenfield or brand new thing. But he had a great talk about existing architecture and going event driven. He talked about doing a small part of your architecture and going bit by bit. By using an incremental model.

David Boyne - Awesome EventBridge

David Boyne joined AWS and does ‘Awesome EventBridge’. He has open source projects. And he does a great talk on 'Thinking Event First'. How to approach events and get your schemes right. And really think about your domain model and lock it in from day one. So he's got a bunch of tools as well. So it's worth looking up his resources on ‘awesome event bridge’.

Marcia Villalba - FooBar Serverless

Another great speaker was Marcia Villalba. She's one of the developer advocates at AWS. She's got great content on good practices and getting started. She has a really nice way of explaining these concepts. There is one thing I get nervous about around event driven and domain driven. People who are good at it tend to get very complicated very quickly and lose everyone. But Marcia's super at bringing these concepts across and helping normal teams, which is every team. Check out her FooBar Serverless YouTube channel. There is tons of developer friendly content from beginner to more advanced. It's one of my YouTube subscriptions that I watch quite regularly.

Lego Talk - Sarah Hamilton and Sheen Brisals

The last one to talk about is Lego. They sponsored the event. And they had two talks. Sarah Hamilton is one of the software engineers and she gave a really good talk about the advanced techniques they're using in their event driven architecture. My friend, Sheen Brisals was speaking as well. They have a fantastic story, which is well worth listening to. It's about how they moved to an event driven serverless architecture. There's a socio-technical element to this. How you organise your teams and the attitude is what I would call a core engineering competency and mindset. As opposed to an architectural pattern. Lego tells their story brilliantly.

Product Leader panel

The event ended with a panel of product leaders from Eventbridge, Step Functions and MongoDB. It was a really relaxed panel. Emily Shea, who we know well, was there. She works in go to market for serverless. It was a relaxed chat. No one was pushing any tools. They were shooting the breeze on good practice and what's coming down the track. The evolution of event driven architecture and the tie in with serverless. There's something in it! I don't want to say Serverless is becoming EDA or EDA is becoming serverless. But serverless enables EDA for sure.

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