Events, Streams, Devops and Velocity!

Today we are experiencing a profound shift in how we understand distributed systems. Organizations want interconnected reactionary systems that drive microservices, machine learning, system accounting, and observability. Also, throw in some IoT to keep things interesting. Today’s world operates under a new set of constraints and tries to solve problems that were never thought possible. Everything has changed. Underpinning this change is the need for event-driven applications. Not only to drive reactions and break down silos but more fundamentally change how we design, build, and architect the systems. The common element is the event. And more so, we need to think about our systems in terms of events. Hence, event-first thinking changes everything. The big question is – how to make this a reality? How do we support existing DevOps practices and continuous delivery commitments? In this talk, I discuss the merits of event-first system design and how systems architecture is evolving. The journey to event-driven architecture is not a free lunch, and we need to not only commit to operating them at scale but also support the full software development lifecycle. I will cover testing practices, from unit, integration pipelines, but also touch on data quality and then patterns of adoption. It’s the patterns where we begin to understand how continuous delivery is applied, how to make it synergistically fit with existing processes, and also allow running systems 24×7 while supporting evolution.