Cloud Native Event Message Transformation

When designing a cloud native architecture on an enterprise scale it is most likely that you cannot start with a green-field situation. In all reality it is very likely that the enterprise landscape has grown in an organically manner over the years and the “legacy” systems are a given for a longer period of time.

Even though building a strategy and an architecture for a complete green-field landscape is much easier than a transformation it is a very common reality and you are more likely to see a transformation than seeing a complete green-field.

Transform to event driven
Within enterprises there is a need to drive the standing architecture more to a real-time and event-based architecture principle. Different types of event driven architecture exist, such as; event carried state transfer, event sourcing and others. The type of event driven architecture is not a part of this post.

When moving to an event driven architecture the main change, from a high-level perspective, is that previously isolated systems will start to generate events and publish them to a central location where other systems can subscribe to the events and act upon them.

A commonly seen implementation is the use of Apache Kafka as a central “event hub” where (sub-)systems publish events and other (sub-)systems are subscribed to a specific topic containing events from N number of (sub-)systems.