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Building Event-Driven Microservices: Leveraging Organizational Data at Scale
Organizations today often struggle to balance business requirements with ever-increasing volumes of data. Additionally, the demand for leveraging large-scale, real-time data is growing rapidly among the most competitive digital industries. Conventional system architectures may not be up to the task. With this practical guide, you’ll learn how to leverage large-scale data usage across the business units in your organization using the principles of event-driven microservices. Author Adam Bellemare takes you through the process of building an event-driven microservice-powered organization. You’ll reconsider how data is produced, accessed, and propagated across your organization. Learn powerful yet simple patterns for unlocking the value of this data. Incorporate event-driven design and architectural principles into your own systems. And completely rethink how your organization delivers value by unlocking near-real-time access to data at scale. You’ll
324 pages, Paperback
Published August 11, 2020
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August 17, 2020A great book for ... technocrats. It's all about HOW, but not at all about WHY (the f*ck ...) and WHEN. The level of detail (when it comes to describing low-level technical quirks) is impressive - both for tech-agnostic and tech-specific considerations ("light" and "heavy" frameworks are considered independently here), but I'm kinda worried when I think about what will the reader do with the knowledge acquired thanks to that book, because ...
... in 90% of cases (at least) it's completely unpractical and totally wasteful. Increasing business complexity makes the overall solution complexity skyrocket disproportionally. Async, event-driven microservices make sense only for truly simple scenarios that require massive scalability (typically the transactional part of a typical OLTP system) - sadly, this is never mentioned straight away (explicitly).
In the end - a fun read for someone passionate about architectures and "state-of-art" solutions, but I would not call it very practical.
... in 90% of cases (at least) it's completely unpractical and totally wasteful. Increasing business complexity makes the overall solution complexity skyrocket disproportionally. Async, event-driven microservices make sense only for truly simple scenarios that require massive scalability (typically the transactional part of a typical OLTP system) - sadly, this is never mentioned straight away (explicitly).
In the end - a fun read for someone passionate about architectures and "state-of-art" solutions, but I would not call it very practical.
June 21, 2020
The book is really more about "stream processing" vs. event-driven microservices.
In the beginning the author makes a claim that
"There are a number of issues with synchronous microservices that make them difficult to use at large scale"
but he has not prove that "event-driven" microservices are capable of being used at large scale.
It is not clear who is the audience of the book - he describes some basics, but never has any e2e scenario and constantly changes the context from architecture to tooling without covering any of them.
In the beginning the author makes a claim that
"There are a number of issues with synchronous microservices that make them difficult to use at large scale"
but he has not prove that "event-driven" microservices are capable of being used at large scale.
It is not clear who is the audience of the book - he describes some basics, but never has any e2e scenario and constantly changes the context from architecture to tooling without covering any of them.
April 21, 2021
Again one of those situations when I find it difficult to accurately put into words what I liked about a technical piece of writing and of course the why behind the what. So let's start with the bad instead.
Unless you're familiar with DDD, you may miss the motivation behind some of the presented ideas and ideally you'd want to read both DDD by Eric Evans and Implementing DDD by Vernon Vaughn, although the latter would be more important since the idea of domain events is introduced there and Event-Driven Microservices builds on from there. In doing so, the author also takes a bit of a Kafka-centric approach, and some of the best-practice advice regarding the way you organise events and streams doesn't make a lot of sense if you're creating your event-driven services using a different technology, e.g. Akka.
Now, with that off my chest here's what made this one so worth reading for me. First, I recognized some of the issues with the traditional approach to microservices, which at my current company we managed to solve with event sourcing. Which, as things go in software, gave us a completely different set of issues and this book deals with them. While I can't say the book had much practical value at this point, it did help me articulate better why some approaches work and why others don't. Second, I particularly liked the mix of high-level abstraction of the patterns and the low-level technical detail that can be found in every chapter - the author managed to perfectly time the jumps/switches between the abstract and the technical and also strike a fine balance between the two, keeping most of the patterns abstract, but delving into the nitty-gritty details when they are important to the way you implement the pattern or, sometimes, if those technical details may even be the cause or the enabling factor behind the pattern. Finally, while I know I've mentioned this under the 'bad' column, it's a actually a good thing in my case - the book is a perfect sequel to blue and red DDD books and promotes those ideas even further.
Unless you're familiar with DDD, you may miss the motivation behind some of the presented ideas and ideally you'd want to read both DDD by Eric Evans and Implementing DDD by Vernon Vaughn, although the latter would be more important since the idea of domain events is introduced there and Event-Driven Microservices builds on from there. In doing so, the author also takes a bit of a Kafka-centric approach, and some of the best-practice advice regarding the way you organise events and streams doesn't make a lot of sense if you're creating your event-driven services using a different technology, e.g. Akka.
Now, with that off my chest here's what made this one so worth reading for me. First, I recognized some of the issues with the traditional approach to microservices, which at my current company we managed to solve with event sourcing. Which, as things go in software, gave us a completely different set of issues and this book deals with them. While I can't say the book had much practical value at this point, it did help me articulate better why some approaches work and why others don't. Second, I particularly liked the mix of high-level abstraction of the patterns and the low-level technical detail that can be found in every chapter - the author managed to perfectly time the jumps/switches between the abstract and the technical and also strike a fine balance between the two, keeping most of the patterns abstract, but delving into the nitty-gritty details when they are important to the way you implement the pattern or, sometimes, if those technical details may even be the cause or the enabling factor behind the pattern. Finally, while I know I've mentioned this under the 'bad' column, it's a actually a good thing in my case - the book is a perfect sequel to blue and red DDD books and promotes those ideas even further.
August 17, 2021
Great overview of patterns and techniques for building out an EDA or converting an existing system to be event driven
November 16, 2020
The beggining of the book could be used as first-contact book, but the rest does not provide much information. From my point of view the book is not correctly organized and it is constantly jumping among different topics. The book changes between generic patterns and tools without any sense, the author may want to cover both but at the end I think that neither of them were covered. From my point of view the title is a little bit misleading since it is mainly focused on event sourcing. I also think that a couple of real/complete examples could be helpful.
Sadly, I didn't take any practical takeaways from this book.
Sadly, I didn't take any practical takeaways from this book.
August 2, 2020
This book attempts to explain multiple event-driven microservice facets and ends up spreading a bit too thin.
I would recommend reading the first eight chapters (of 16) as an introduction where one can find experienced advice.
I would recommend Designing Data-Intensive Applications as the go-to book on the subject.
I would recommend reading the first eight chapters (of 16) as an introduction where one can find experienced advice.
I would recommend Designing Data-Intensive Applications as the go-to book on the subject.
December 30, 2023
"Building Event-Driven Microservices" excellently introduces the benefits of event-driven architecture over traditional synchronous microservices. The book clearly lays out key concepts and patterns, making it a great starting point for understanding this architecture.
While it thoroughly covers the theoretical aspects, some topics like deployment and streaming frameworks are more suited for a separate, dedicated discussion, as they fall outside the book's primary focus.
What particularly impressed me was the author's accessibility. When I reached out with questions, the author's direct assistance greatly enhanced my understanding.
The book also piqued my interest in Domain-Driven Design (DDD), a topic I had been putting off. Overall, this book is a valuable resource for anyone looking to grasp event-driven microservices, backed by commendable author support.
While it thoroughly covers the theoretical aspects, some topics like deployment and streaming frameworks are more suited for a separate, dedicated discussion, as they fall outside the book's primary focus.
What particularly impressed me was the author's accessibility. When I reached out with questions, the author's direct assistance greatly enhanced my understanding.
The book also piqued my interest in Domain-Driven Design (DDD), a topic I had been putting off. Overall, this book is a valuable resource for anyone looking to grasp event-driven microservices, backed by commendable author support.
January 19, 2024
If, somehow, you have already decided that this kind of architecture is for you (or that decision has been made for you) and you want the technical details of how to handle its myriad of complexities then you might want to read this book. If you haven't decided yet then this book won't help and it might put you off for life.
The pages are information dense but the bulk of the content feels more like a brain dump than an organised reference so be prepared for a long slog. Exceptions to that are the (short) introduction to DDD and the testing chapter which are clear and self contained. Good luck!
The pages are information dense but the bulk of the content feels more like a brain dump than an organised reference so be prepared for a long slog. Exceptions to that are the (short) introduction to DDD and the testing chapter which are clear and self contained. Good luck!
January 3, 2021
Good write on this topic. However sometimes to abstract or to obvious.
August 14, 2023
I'd like to praise Adam's writing style. Condensed, almost academical, this style fits very well with the complex subject at hand. This isn't a book to read between the connecting flights, it does require your full attention and rewards it with valuable insights.
"Building Event-Driven Microservices" is a book about practical choices, tradeoffs and implications. How to "materialize" the state from the stream, how to scale instances and propagate the state between them, how to deal with late and out of order events, how to re-process events, how to implement complex workflows? All these questions are usually answered with "it depends" and that's where this book steps in. For each critical decision, author lists the available choices and implication of the strategy.
What you will **not** learn from this book is how to design events or how to break a complex business domain into meaningful services. You would also not learn **when** to use event driven architecture. These choices are beyond the scope of this work, but it doesn't make this book any less valuable. For those interested in the topics, I would recommend "Implementing Domain Driven Design" and "Strategic Monoliths and Microservices" - both are fantastic books covering respective subjects in much greater depth.
Now about the downsides. This book is very Kafka-centric. I'd like to hear author's opinion about other event brokers, especially cloud-native ones. And, since we talk about cloud, there's very little about serverless functions as event-driven microservices. The book is written in 2020, and now it feels like the topic is incomplete without a thorough discussion of cloud-native and FaaS patterns.
"Building Event-Driven Microservices" is a book about practical choices, tradeoffs and implications. How to "materialize" the state from the stream, how to scale instances and propagate the state between them, how to deal with late and out of order events, how to re-process events, how to implement complex workflows? All these questions are usually answered with "it depends" and that's where this book steps in. For each critical decision, author lists the available choices and implication of the strategy.
What you will **not** learn from this book is how to design events or how to break a complex business domain into meaningful services. You would also not learn **when** to use event driven architecture. These choices are beyond the scope of this work, but it doesn't make this book any less valuable. For those interested in the topics, I would recommend "Implementing Domain Driven Design" and "Strategic Monoliths and Microservices" - both are fantastic books covering respective subjects in much greater depth.
Now about the downsides. This book is very Kafka-centric. I'd like to hear author's opinion about other event brokers, especially cloud-native ones. And, since we talk about cloud, there's very little about serverless functions as event-driven microservices. The book is written in 2020, and now it feels like the topic is incomplete without a thorough discussion of cloud-native and FaaS patterns.
October 22, 2020
This book was helpful in improving my understanding of event-driven microservices and streaming. My experience with messaging, APIs, architecture and domain-driven design meant that I needed to “plug the gaps” in knowledge rather than learn the area from the beginning. Hence the 4 star rating - it was good for my purposes.
I can understand the feedback from other reviews though. It was hard going in places and it took me longer than it should have to finish the book. It is in no way a complete treatise on the area and the content seems to be at an awkward level that doesn’t fully explain the area from any typical perspective. Not enough why for leaders/consultants guiding adoption of the event-driven microservices, and the technical detail varied throughout sections so wasn’t complete enough for most architects who want to apply the concepts. But it is helpful if you understand integration and architecture but just need to deepen your understanding of event-driven architectures.
I can understand the feedback from other reviews though. It was hard going in places and it took me longer than it should have to finish the book. It is in no way a complete treatise on the area and the content seems to be at an awkward level that doesn’t fully explain the area from any typical perspective. Not enough why for leaders/consultants guiding adoption of the event-driven microservices, and the technical detail varied throughout sections so wasn’t complete enough for most architects who want to apply the concepts. But it is helpful if you understand integration and architecture but just need to deepen your understanding of event-driven architectures.
November 20, 2021
This book is really great for newcomers to the world of Event-Driven Microservices. It gives a good overview of the different concepts, patterns, design principles, tools and trade offs related to this kind of systems. It can get very detailed and technical at times, which is why I recommend to take notes in order to get the most of this book, as you probably won't remember all the concepts from memory alone.
The two chapters about heavyweight and lightweight streaming frameworks were slightly out of scope, I think they could have been skipped or trimmed at least.
The two chapters about heavyweight and lightweight streaming frameworks were slightly out of scope, I think they could have been skipped or trimmed at least.
September 26, 2023
Might be one of the worst technical books I've ever read, I have a feeling the author is constantly switching contexts, never giving real-world examples but weird abstract ones instead. Honestly, it might be better if the book had no examples.
I have some experience with edm and I was hoping to learn how others are building event-driven microservices and what are some of the best practices, but I wasn't able to do it from this book.
I have some experience with edm and I was hoping to learn how others are building event-driven microservices and what are some of the best practices, but I wasn't able to do it from this book.
December 6, 2023
Building Event-Driven Microservices gives a deep dive into the world of event-driven architectures, solutions, and tools. Altho, I would not advise it to beginners like myself. The amount of information is too deep, for someone with no experience in the tools, to understand all the concepts. The event-driven capabilities are mostly directed to Data solutions (and probably correct), and less to my overall programming experience (read-write from-to Kafka streams).
December 7, 2023
This is a nice book to introduce you on the world of event brokers implementation and microservice world. It shows concepts like brokers, streams, topologies, producers, consumers, event schemas, CMS, etc.
This book is better if you already have a notion about what is the flow of pub/sub services like AWS SNS/SQS
This book is better if you already have a notion about what is the flow of pub/sub services like AWS SNS/SQS
March 2, 2024
4/5
sometimes hard to read. The book is really good but can be a little bit better organized. Jumping from one topic to another, from deep dive to really high-level. While reading I felt sometimes that it was not completed.
But on the other side, there were good ideas that I took into account and went to "google" them.
sometimes hard to read. The book is really good but can be a little bit better organized. Jumping from one topic to another, from deep dive to really high-level. While reading I felt sometimes that it was not completed.
But on the other side, there were good ideas that I took into account and went to "google" them.
November 11, 2020
Solid overview on the questions to ask and design patterns to consider when building event driven micro serves. I particularly love that there is no one size fits all approach that’s so critical to how we build world class software.
December 30, 2020
If you're developing event driven microservices or working with streaming systems then you should be aware of all topics covered in this book. Scope of this book is quite ok. Unfortunately I had issues with book readability, the way how particular topics are explained, sometimes I was missing broader context why author is mentioning them.
Definitely this is not a book for beginners.
Definitely this is not a book for beginners.
September 23, 2022
Very strong coverage from the conceptual perspective, almost no practical or implementation tips.
Read if you have already have experience in event driven Microservices and you need to structure your knowledge
Don't read if you are new to the topic, not the good start.
Read if you have already have experience in event driven Microservices and you need to structure your knowledge
Don't read if you are new to the topic, not the good start.
December 10, 2022
I found the first third useful but then it focuses on a lot of implementation details that I glazed over. Probably will come back to it as a reference. I was hoping for more coverage of designing the events and some concrete case studies.
March 28, 2023
This book explains several relevant topics regarding event-driven architectures, balancing theoretical and practical aspects.
It serves as a good starting point to deepen into specific areas afterward.
It serves as a good starting point to deepen into specific areas afterward.
May 5, 2022
Was a bit theoretical, so I ended up skimming more than I had wanted to, but I learned a few things.
May 17, 2022
Good overview. Title seems a little off as it's mostly about streaming
October 21, 2022
I have my overviews here: https://trunin.com/en/tags/building-e...
December 2, 2023
The content was ok but I wish there were more detailed illustrative examples.
May 17, 2024
Overall a very good book that helped me understand the concepts behind event driven microservices.
I found the end of the book to be a bit off-topic, while still providing good information.
I found the end of the book to be a bit off-topic, while still providing good information.
December 15, 2024
All these books are essentially the same at wind point but this one is good if you've never read anything else. Otherwise it's a nice reminder
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews