EXPERT SPEAK
At least once , I will admit I have authorised a new technology stack as a kind of excuse removal . I would not accept another busted sprint that the team blamed squarely on the legacy application .
Event streaming may have a lot of hype , but one cannot compellingly argue that it has not changed the world . Activities most of us do daily , like ordering packages from Amazon , using a credit card , or calling an Uber , have us interacting with systems that depend on event messaging systems . That does not necessarily mean that event streaming makes sense for every use case .
Faster versus better
So , how does one decide if it makes sense in your enterprise ? Practitioners often cite real-time as streaming ’ s chief virtue . Yet , event streaming may still be worth the investment even if reducing the latency between data generation and insight is not that important .
I have met many who dismiss streaming as just a faster batch that should only be used when low latency is required . I have come to believe this is the same fallacy
Microsoft made when it simply saw mobile as a desktop experience with a small screen .
Apple instead saw mobile as a new paradigm that would transform how people interacted with technology , and it won . Similarly , many incumbents did not recognise the Internet ’ s potential . They were displaced : from newspapers seeing the Internet as just high-margin distribution to shops only seeing the Internet as a new channel to sell existing inventory .
Paradigm changes do not offer a faster , better world of yesterday but a
History is full of examples of companies that embrace the new paradigms to beat those that just see faster horses and smaller devices . fundamentally new way of doing things . History is full of examples of companies that embrace the new paradigms to beat those that just see faster horses and smaller devices .
Reduced time to market
Event-driven architectures are a similar enabling capability . They create new opportunities and approaches to building software and structuring technology teams . In particular , streaming ’ s reduced time-to-market for new insights is transformational .
As companies become software , we cannot anticipate every use of data in our products a priori . With event streaming , a new product or insight is often a matter of building a new consumer group rather than needing to break apart an existing data model . The bigger data gets , the more specialised one must be in how it is organised and queried .
In event streaming , the specialisation is that data is optimised for consumption rather than a particular query pattern . More than other paradigms , it supports new ideas and product features .
Yield versus mousetrap
This creates another important effect : by decoupling applications from bespoke pointto-point communication paths , dependencies between teams become better specified and scalable . Event messaging provides a foundation for different teams to produce events than those that consume them .
In my experience , the technology bets that foster process improvements that better align the product and technology organisations to respond to business realities yield far better outcomes than those that are better mousetraps that incrementally improve TCO , development velocity , or application performance .
And that may be the most important Roi consideration for deciding if event streaming makes sense in your organisation . •
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