Event-driven
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Event-driven architecture means services react to things that happen instead of constantly asking 'did anything change?' When a user signs up, an event fires. The email service hears it and sends a welcome email. The analytics service hears it and logs the signup. Nobody is polling — everyone is listening.
Real Talk
Event-driven architecture is a design pattern where services communicate through events (messages describing something that happened) rather than direct calls. Services emit events to an event bus; other services subscribe and react. Promotes loose coupling, scalability, and extensibility.
When You'll Hear This
"We moved to event-driven so services don't directly call each other." / "The OrderCreated event triggers three downstream processes."
Related Terms
Message Queue
A Message Queue is a waiting room for tasks. Producers drop tasks in the queue, consumers pick them up and process them one at a time.
Microservice
Microservices is an architecture where instead of one big app, you have many tiny apps that each do one thing.
Pub/Sub (Pub/Sub)
Pub/Sub is like a newspaper service. Publishers write articles and drop them off.
WebSocket
WebSocket is like upgrading a walkie-talkie from push-to-talk to a full phone call.