EDA adoption assessment question¶
This section lists a set of questions architects can use to assess the EDA deployment and adoption.
Definitions used in the questions¶
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Event | represents a significant change in state or an occurrence that has happened within a system. It is a domain-specific occurrence that reflects a change in the state of the domain model |
| Event backbone | core middleware that facilitates asynchronous communication and storage of events. It possesses high availability and replayability capabilities, ensuring the reliable handling and persistence of events. |
| Event schema | structured definition that describes the format and structure of an event within an event-driven system. Avro, Json, XSD are common way to define schemas |
| Queue | Queues are addressable locations to deliver messages to and store them reliably until they need to be consumed. |
| Topics | represent end-points to publish and consume records |
| Multi-tenant | a single instance of software serves multiple customers or tenants |
| Domain | we use the domain driven design definition : specific area of knowledge, activity, or interest that is the focus of a particular application |
| Bounded context | boundaries within which a particular domain model applies, ensuring clarity and focus. |
Business¶
| Question | Response | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| What specific business goals are you aiming to achieve with event-driven architecture? | ||
| How will this architecture align with your overall digital transformation strategy? | ||
| Is the EDA is a tactical strategy to address some application requirements around resilience and scaling ? or is it more strategic initiative? | ||
| Do you use event in few application, isolated, mostly supplementary to other development activities? | ||
| Are you taking any business decision, automatically, on the events created in close real-time? | ||
| Do you have a strategic use and governance of EDA, promoted cross-organization by IT leadership? | ||
| Do you have some governance authority for API, Events, business services, business process and data definitions? A center of excellence, or competence. | ||
| Do you want to move to managed services and scale to zero infrastructure? | ||
| Do you adopt a multi cloud provider strategy? |
Current architecture¶
| Question | Response | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Do you use an event-bus currently? | ||
| Do you use a shared event cluster between domains? | ||
| Do you use queues in point to point and topics for pub/sub or both? | ||
| Which technology for queueing and messaging? | ||
| How many event backbone clusters? | ||
| How many node per cluster in average? | ||
| Do you use baremetal nodes or VM based or pure container on k8s? | ||
| Do you deploy cluster in different regions / Datacenters? | ||
| Do you consider datalake or lakehouse to be a target sink for events? | ||
| How many applications are using events / messaging today? | ||
| Does some of those topics / queues exposed as part of a B2B interaction? | ||
| Do you classify your business applications into different business impact classification ? if so are all the critical applications using asynchronous communication today? | ||
| If classifications are in place can you share uptime requirements? | ||
| What are the DR needs today? | ||
| Are you using process orchestration product today? | ||
| Do you have remote applications that needs access data with lower latency? how many of them? | ||
| Do you have exposed topic or queue to the public internet? | ||
| How many application are exposing business services today? REST or SOAP? | ||
| Do you use schema registry? How many of them? | ||
| Do you use Avro schema, protobuf or JSON or a combination of them? None is possible too. | ||
| Do you use AsyncAPI document to document topics and schema? | ||
| Do you generate technical events from file upload to bucket notification and content management? | ||
| Do you consider logs to be a source of events? | ||
| Do you use container and orchestration like Kubernetes in your modern application development practices? | ||
| How long do you need to keep events in event backbone? | ||
| For audit reason do you need to keep message for longer term ? Do you need to replay event of the past? | ||
| Do you use some dedicated connector framework to integrate systems to your event backbone? | ||
| Do you use topic replication between event clusters today? | ||
| Do you use stateful processing on the events to compute aggregate within time windows? | ||
| Are you using an API management platfor; today? Does it support AsyncAPI management too? |
Future architecture¶
| Question | Response | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| How many applications will use events / messaging next year? | ||
| How many applications need to be changed to generate events or consume events? | ||
| Can you give us the scalability requirements in term of transaction per second on average and at peak? | ||
| Do you need transactional applications with strong consistency be integrated in your EDA? | ||
| Do you need to integrate data coming from mainframe? | ||
| Do you plan to use streaming for consuming event, processing them and generate new events? | ||
| Do you have a need to manage topic from a single user interface? | ||
| Do you want to apply event-sourcing as an implementation pattern? |
Event sources¶
| Question | Response | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| What are you connecting in term of native applications ? | ||
| Do you use change data capture today to get event from database? | ||
| What are data replications ? | ||
| Where are existing data sources ? | ||
| Is there any SaaS integration for data source? | ||
| Do we have requirements for private networking? |
Event Sinks¶
| Question | Response | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Do you plan to use Lakehouse technology to persist event? | ||
| Do you plan to use database to persist data from event? | ||
| Where are you connecting to? |
DevOps¶
| Question | Response | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| How many developers implement asynchronous event generation for business applications? | ||
| Are schema management part of your DevOps practices? | ||
| Do you automate event backbone cluster creation with Infrastructure as Code? | ||
| Do you automate topic and queue creation? | ||
| Do you have the necessary in-house skills, or will you need to hire or train staff? | ||
| Do you use Domain-driven design and event storming to model the application logic with events? | ||
| Do you have automatic process to sccale up the messaging middleware? | ||
| Do you manage consumer lag behind for the event processing? |
Governance¶
| Question | Response | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Does the organization has standard practices? | ||
| Are the API and Event designs and development coordinated? | ||
| Do you have a process to identify message consumers automatically? | ||
| Do you track data lineage today from producer to different consumers and to sinks? |
Security¶
| Question | Response | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| What security measures are needed to protect event data? | ||
| Do you need to uniquely control access to topic or queue for each application? |