What is Event-Driven Integration and Why It Matters
Event-driven integration is a highly effective architectural approach to solution integration. It is one of a number of integration capabilities you may consider as part of the modernisation or digital transformation of business systems.
In this blog, 9Yards senior consultants explore the benefits of event-driven integration and offer strategies to enable it within your organisation.
What is event-driven integration?
Event-driven integration is a method of connecting systems that enables real-time responsiveness to changes in data or processes. Event-driven integration does not require continuous polling or tightly coupled dependencies.
Components of event-driven integration include:
- Events: The fundamental unit of information, capturing a specific change or action within a system.
- Producers: systems or applications that publish events.
- Consumers: systems or applications that subscribe to and process events.
- Event Broker: a mediator that asynchronously routes events between producers and consumers.
Events are transmitted as they occur, allowing systems to react dynamically. In this model, producers and consumers are ‘decoupled’, meaning they do not need to have knowledge of each other. This is a key difference between event-driven integration and other integration methods:
Event-driven integration is characterised by:
- Decoupling of systems: Producers and consumers operate independently, enabling flexibility and reducing dependency chains.
- Real-time updates: Changes in one system propagate instantly to others.
- Scalability: New systems can subscribe to events without affecting existing integrations.
By adopting event-driven integration, your IT leaders can ensure the solutions architecture remains efficient, scalable and able to respond quickly to business requirements and achieve business goals.
Other approaches to system integration
Event-driven integration is one approach that’s highly effective.
In comparison:
- API-Driven Integration operates synchronously, which means the requesting system waits for an immediate response. By comparison, event-driven integration is asynchronous, with no direct dependency between systems.
- In message-driven integration messages are sent with an assumption that a consumer will process them as part of a particular business process. By comparison, in event-driven integration, there’s no requirement for an event to have a specific consumer or for events to follow a particular processing path.
Benefits of event-driven integration
When choosing an approach, there are many benefits to opting for event-driven integration.
1. Improved responsiveness
With real-time updates, downstream systems can immediately react to changes. For example, an e-commerce platform can update inventory systems, notify marketing tools, and trigger financial reporting as soon as a sale is made—no need for periodic batch jobs or manual reconciliation.
2. Enhanced decoupling
Event-driven architecture promotes modularity. Systems can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently, allowing IT teams and software vendors to focus on creating robust solutions without tailoring them to specific integrations.
3. Rich analytics and monitoring
Events provide valuable insights into system activity. By analysing event streams, businesses can develop dashboards, set alerts, and monitor key performance indicators. This empowers better decision-making and supports proactive system management.
4. Scalability and efficiency
As organisations grow, their integration needs become more complex. Event-driven systems scale easily to accommodate new subscribers, additional event types, and increased data volumes. Modern event brokers like Kafka or TIBCO provide the infrastructure needed to effectively handle high-throughput demands.
Considerations for implementing event-driven integration
Enabling event-driven integration involves a structured approach, ensuring it aligns with broader enterprise goals.
The 2022 Optus breach provides an example of the kinds of issues that can arise. The breach occurred due to a publicly accessible API, not requiring authentication or authorisation.
1. Develop an integration roadmap
Many organisations start with legacy point-to-point or file-based integrations that lack scalability and flexibility. An integration roadmap will will support a transition to event-driven integration requires a clear roadmap that:
- Assess current state: Evaluate existing systems and integration methods.
- Define the target state architecture: Outline how event-driven integration fits into the enterprise’s overall integration strategy.
- Identify use cases: Prioritise high-impact areas where real-time responsiveness offers the highest value.
2. Leverage an enterprise integration platform
Event-driven integration should be part of a holistic integration strategy, encompassing multiple patterns like API-driven and batch processing where appropriate. When choosing a platform or platforms for enterprise integration, look for an option that supports:
- event publishing and consumption
- topic-based or content-based filtering
- persistence for guaranteed delivery in critical scenarios.
Popular frameworks and tools like Kafka, Spring, and middleware products such as Mulesoft provide building blocks for event-driven integration. It’s important to work with experts like the team at 9Yards to identify a platform that supports your organisation’s business goals.
3. Create and enforce integration patterns
Develop reusable patterns to solve common integration challenges. Patterns define best practices and provide guidelines for when to use event-driven integration or choose other approaches.
4. Mitigate the risks inherent in legacy systems
Failing to modernise integration methods can increase costs, extend resolution times, and increase security risks. By adopting event-driven integration, your organisation can reduce technical debt and future-proof your solution architecture.
5. Establish governance and monitoring
Event-driven systems require robust governance to ensure data quality, security, and compliance. Implement monitoring tools to track event flows, detect anomalies, and measure performance metrics.
How 9Yards can assist with event-driven integration
If your organisation has legacy point-to-point integrations, or file-based integrations, 9Yards can help by developing a target state integration reference architecture and integration roadmap to modernise your integration architecture.
If your organisation is ready to modernise your integration architecture, it’s time to contact our team of expert solution architects and start the conversation.
