Thinking in Events: Principles of Event-Driven Architecture, Part 2 with James Eastham

In Part 2 of our deep dive into event-driven architecture (EDA), James Eastham returns to explore the practical realities of building and maintaining event-driven systems. We go beyond principles and into implementation - from failure handling and orchestration vs. choreography, to observability, testing, security, and real-world migration strategies.

Topics include:

Choreography vs. orchestration: coordination strategies and trade-offs
Failure recovery and the saga pattern
Handling sensitive data in events (PII, encryption, audit)
Observability and distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry
Event versioning, schema evolution, and contract testing
Simple async frontend integration: polling vs. WebSockets
Migrating from a monolith using internal events and change data capture (CDC)
Testing flow vs. structure in EDA systems
The realities of documentation and schema visibility
How to get started with EDA - and why you don’t need microservices to do it

We wrap up with a candid look at how James learns best - by doing and by teaching - and why that matters in the fast-evolving world of distributed systems.

This is Part 2 of a 2-part series. In Part 1 , we discussed the foundational principles of event-driven architecture - including types of coupling, asynchronous communication, event design, and the role of events in decoupling and scaling distributed systems.

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