Event-Driven Architecture Readiness Checklist
A readiness checklist for adopting event-driven architecture. It covers event ownership, schema evolution, delivery semantics, idempotent consumers, sagas, and broker observability.
When to Use This Checklist
Use this checklist before adopting event-driven architecture, where services communicate by publishing and consuming events through a broker such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or NATS rather than calling each other directly. Event-driven systems decouple services and scale well, but they trade synchronous certainty for eventual consistency and introduce new failure modes around delivery, ordering, and schema evolution.
How to Use This Checklist
Start with the contract: define event types, assign ownership to producing services, and register schemas so they can evolve without breaking consumers. Decide delivery semantics and design consumers to be idempotent, because most brokers deliver at least once and will redeliver. Plan dead-letter handling for messages that cannot be processed. Use the saga pattern for transactions that span services.
Propagate trace context through the broker and monitor consumer lag from day one.
What Good Looks Like
A ready event-driven system has owned, schema-registered event types that evolve compatibly, idempotent consumers, and a dead-letter strategy. Delivery semantics and ordering guarantees match consumer needs. Sagas coordinate cross-service transactions, trace context flows through the broker, and dashboards track consumer lag, throughput, and errors. Each channel has a documented AsyncAPI contract.
Common Pitfalls
The most damaging mistake is non-idempotent consumers that double-process on redelivery. Teams skip the schema registry and a producer change silently breaks consumers. Missing dead-letter handling lets one poison message block a partition. No trace propagation makes distributed debugging across the broker nearly impossible.
Related Resources
See Apache Kafka streaming best practices, schema evolution with a schema registry, the saga pattern, and event sourcing. The AsyncAPI specification documents event contracts and distributed tracing best practices cover observability across the broker.