Event-driven architectures - Serverless Applications Lens
Reference architectureConfiguration notes

Event-driven architectures

Event-driven architectures are becoming a popular and preferable way of building large distributed microservice-based applications. This approach helps you build scalable, resilient, agile and cost-effective solutions.

Using AWS serverless services to implement event-driven approach will allow you to build scalable, fault tolerant applications. You can use messaging services like Amazon SQS for reliable and durable communication between microservices. For fan out of the events you can use Amazon SNS topics. If you need event filtering and routing you can utilize Amazon EventBridge.

Typical use cases for event-driven architectures:

  • Communication between microservices

  • Integration with third-party SaaS applications

  • Cross-account and cross region data replication

  • Parallel event processing, fanout

Reference architecture

Every event-driven architecture consists of three main parts:

  • Event sources

  • Event routers

  • Event destinations

The most common event sources could be other AWS services, your microservices or applications, or third-party SaaS offerings. For routing those events, you can create rules matching specific parts of the event and provide destinations of where to send them. You describe the rules and destinations with the help of Amazon EventBridge.

Reference architecture diagram for an EventBridge deployment

Figure 7: Reference architecture for EventBridge deployment

When you are building event-driven microservices applications, it's important to agree on the data contract for the event producers and consumers. This will help to validate the events and automatically generate bindings for the used programming language. Amazon EventBridge allows you to use schemas in OpenAPI 3 and JSONSchema Draft4 formats.

As all the event-driven applications are distributed it is important to use tracing to understand and observe service dependencies and diagnose any bottlenecks and issues in the application. To use tracing, you can enable integration between EventBridge and AWS X-Ray.

Configuration notes

EventBridge can introduce additional latency to the application. If latency is a concern, consider using Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS for event filtering and routing.