Those who made it through tropical storm Debby and into the Truist Innovation Center in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina were treated to a focused and personal full-day workshop about Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). This event format is really great for painting a full picture of event-driven architecture. In this blog, I will provide a brief overview of the day along with some fun anecdotes and loads of information.

Event-Driven Architecture and Serverless

One cool thing about the EDA Roadshow with AWS and Ippon was the ability to hear multiple perspectives about the space. On one side, you have AWS which creates amazing, innovative solutions that can be utilized to build serverless applications leveraging event-driven architecture. On the other side, you have Ippon, a consulting agency and expertise firm with real-world experience implementing the various technologies and patterns discussed at the event. 

AWS is quick to point out that event-driven architecture and serverless don’t always have to go hand in hand. You can also modernize a monolithic application with EDA. This is accomplished by adding some code to emit signals that can trigger event-driven workflows. And those services and workflows don’t have to be on Lambda or use step-functions, they could just be services that run on an EC2 instance that consume from a queue (like SQS).

Ippon presented a use case that they built for a client that is a Fortune 500 company. The client was modernizing off of a mainframe and Ippon built an event-driven application to facilitate the migration of the various accounts. This allowed the organization to modernize its mainframe in nine months, a truly amazing and fast accomplishment. Presenting about this at the event lends weight to the claims that AWS makes regarding EDA.

In addition to Ippon presentations and the AWS workshop presentations about Event Driven Architecture, we also learned about loads of other things. One such thing was an overview of frequently used design patterns when building in the cloud (not just EDA). It was cool to see how the different patterns, like the Saga pattern or circuit breaker pattern, fit into the context of all the various AWS services. Ippon also put on an awesome informative session all about the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), of which Ippon is an AWS Partner.

Serverlesspresso 

If you haven’t ever seen the Serverlesspresso demo by AWS - you are missing out! Matt Diamond was in the house demoing the amazingly cool serverless application called “Serverlesspresso”. It leverages AWS Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, AWS SNS, and SQS. With this architecture, AWS was able to serve over 1500 coffees at AWS re:Invent all for the tiny sum of $7.00.

The Demo, when combined with the content from the roadshow, really helped solidify the concepts discussed. They went over the architecture and even had labs where you could build it yourself during the event. By the way, AWS Workshops Labs was an amazing way to experience using AWS services without having to stress about costs and free tier stuff. A big part of the demo and architecture discussion is leveraging the “thought methodology” for designing such applications, which I will talk about in-depth below.

Event Storming

Another fun part of the roadshow was a hands-on event-storming session. Event storming is a way of thinking about application and process design created by Alberto Brandolini. Embarking on an event-storming session, with a bunch of strangers, all within the time frame and context of the EDA roadshow was a lot of fun. They split all participants up into groups and passed out sticky notes and Sharpies. Each team was tasked with planning out the high-level design of Serverlesspresso using EDA.

This included writing things on sticky notes like `OrderCreated` or `PaymentReceived`. Once everyone had created all of the “signals” or “events” that they thought made up the Serverlesspresso workflow (that is demoed at the start), the stickies were then combined on whiteboards in a specific order. Next, Matt guided the group through the process of finding the “domains” and the “bounded context” of the various parts of the application. Later on in the day, when the Serverlesspresso build-out happened in the lab, these bounded contexts translated directly into the workflows built using AWS Lambda and Step Functions. It was a really cool end-to-end demo!!!

Conclusion

If you ever have the opportunity to attend an event like this, I cannot recommend it enough. From the food, the atmosphere, the after-party, and all of the content and demonstrations, it was a blast! Ippon and AWS love working together to put events like this together and have had a lot of success in various cities pulling the event off (even when there is a hurricane or tropical storm). If you are interested in learning more about event-driven architecture, reach out! We would love to chat and see if there are any cool projects we can work together on.