The Importance of Consistency in Event Driven Architectures

TLDRConsistency is crucial in event driven architectures. State changes must be published after being persisted to ensure accurate workflows and business processes.

Key insights

⚖️Consistency is important in event driven architectures to ensure that state changes are accurately reflected in published events.

🔄Race conditions can occur when events are published before state changes are persisted, leading to inconsistent data.

To ensure consistency, state changes should be persisted before publishing events.

🔁Fallback mechanisms, such as persisting events to durable storage and retrying publishing, can help mitigate failures in event propagation.

Using platforms that support workflows and guarantee the execution of activities can provide reliable event publishing and processing.

Q&A

What happens if events are published before state changes are persisted?

This can lead to race conditions and inconsistencies where downstream services may act on events that have not been persisted. It is crucial to ensure state changes are persisted before publishing events.

How can race conditions be mitigated?

By persisting state changes before publishing events, race conditions can be avoided. Additionally, using fallback mechanisms like durable storage and retrying publishing can help ensure eventual consistency.

What are some best practices for ensuring consistency in event driven architectures?

Persist state changes before publishing events, implement fallback mechanisms for event propagation, and consider using platforms that guarantee the execution of workflows to ensure consistent event processing.

What are the downsides of implementing fallback mechanisms in event driven architectures?

Fallback mechanisms can add performance overhead due to additional operations on the primary database. It is important to consider the impact on database load and performance when implementing fallback mechanisms.

Are there any other patterns or techniques for ensuring consistency in event driven architectures?

Yes, the outbox pattern and the use of CDC tools for outbox implementation are other options for ensuring consistency in event driven architectures. Additionally, using platforms that support durable workflows can provide reliable event processing.

Timestamped Summary

00:00In event driven architectures, consistency is crucial to ensure accurate workflows and business processes.

02:18Publishing events before persisting state changes can lead to race conditions and inconsistencies.

03:49To ensure consistency, state changes should be persisted before publishing events.

05:53Fallback mechanisms, like persisting events to durable storage and retrying publishing, can mitigate failures in event propagation.

09:46Using platforms that support workflows and guarantee activity execution can provide reliable event processing.