Event-Driven Architecture with Kafka

Overview

Build an event-driven system where services communicate through events instead of direct API calls.

In a microservice world, services calling each other directly creates tight coupling.

You will build 6 architecture steps that model production dependencies.

You will run 1 failure experiment to observe bottlenecks and recovery behavior.

Success target: All three consumers process events independently, system handles spikes gracefully.

Learning Objectives

• Understand event-driven architecture and its benefits over direct service calls
• Know how Kafka provides durable, ordered event streaming
• Learned about consumer groups and partition-based parallelism
• Experienced the resilience of decoupled event-driven systems

Prerequisites

• Topic Hub: event-driven architecture
• Chapter 26: Batch & Stream Processing
• Prior Lab: Async Processing with Message Queues

Experiments

1. Set Kafka partitions to 1 to see the bottleneck