When dealing with (micro-) services, we often face business processes that span multiple bounded contexts. Different ways of implementing this lead to massively divergent results, varying above all in complexity and manageability. Especially when applying Event-driven Architecture, its asynchronous nature clashes with a desire for global control and synchronous responses, sometimes leading to chimeras that combine the “worst of both worlds”.
This talk will establish some guiding principles, and use them to assess common approaches. It will explore the importance of responsibility boundaries, and of bringing the data to the behavior.
A common mistake in the event-driven world is to replicate monolith workflows, resulting in an excessive need for orchestration or workflow tooling, or (in the worst case) a “distributed monolith”. How can this be avoided? The talk will introduce the concept of microworkflows, and show how challenging and re-designing your processes will lead to better systems. And lastly, we will ask ourselves: Should the saga pattern be considered harmful?