Event Driven Architecture

Recently, I’ve been reading about Event Driven Architecture (EDA).  This is really exciting stuff and I’m convinced that it will be the future of the data center.

Combine this with virtualization and configuration management tools (like Chef) and EDA provides the mechanism for intelligent architecture that is automated and flexible.  Imagine an infrastructure that can not only alert you when a machine fails, but know what it means and trigger the actions necessary to fix it.  The problem could be fixed automatically before the notification email is delivered to your inbox!  This is the first stepping stone to true artificial intelligence at the infrastructure level.  Just as event driven programming transformed software applications, EDA will transform the data center!

I’ve incorporated EDA into my vision for our infrastructure and determined the tools necessary to start building the foundation of our EDA.  The first thing you need to build an EDA is a message bus that is accessible across the entire infrastructure.  RabbitMQ seems to be a great fit for this part of the EDA model.  It is a redundant, fault tolerant, high performance messaging queue.  It is built with the AMQP messaging protocol in mind and is ideal for the system wide messaging infrastructure that my vision requires.

Once the messaging queue (or message bus) is in place, we can proceed to the next step in implementing our EDA infrastructure.  Stay tuned!