Event-driven microservices (EDMs) are among the best ways to build microservices. EDMs are flexible and scale well—organizationally and computationally—because they avoid tight coupling. However, EDMs require a messaging layer, which is almost impossible to implement correctly. Ambar is the easiest, safest, and fastest way to implement a messaging layer for event-driven microservices.

Microservices Must Avoid Tight Coupling

The concept of microservices (event-driven or not) is excellent in theory. Each microservice is responsible for a specific task, independent from other services, providing a modular approach to software development and empowering engineering teams to develop new features rapidly. Each team can focus on a subset of microservices, leveraging the best tools and technologies wherever needed. Team specialization leads to expertise, which in turn leads to higher-quality systems and faster feature delivery. Additionally, each team can scale their microservices independently based on demand, yielding decoupled scalability that adapts to the needs of the business.

Unfortunately, all the benefits above vanish when microservices are tightly coupled. As a company grows, tight coupling is problematic because the number of service-to-service integration paths grows out of control. Development and maintenance costs go through the roof because tight coupling requires careful planning and coordination with every new feature. The ensuing low productivity strains engineering resources, ultimately slowing the company and affecting morale!

EDMS Avoid Tight Coupling

So, how can microservices avoid tight coupling? By avoiding many-to-many communication patterns like remote procedure calls and cross-service querying, such as GraphQL. Thus, the opposite question arises: how can microservices be decoupled? By communicating through a common messaging layer via well-defined events. In other words, by implementing microservices as EDMs.

The messaging layer is critical to EDMs. It centralizes data storage, processing, and transmission, reducing the complexity of system integrations. It acts as a hub where different systems easily exchange information, ensuring consistency and reducing the risk of data silos, thereby increasing the reliability of the system. Moreover, discrepancies and errors are less likely because all systems rely on a single source of truth for communication. Crucially, these benefits depend on a messaging layer that is easy to work with, safe to use, and fast to deploy.

Ambar: The Ultimate Messaging Layer

Ambar is the comprehensive solution for a messaging layer required to implement a correct event-driven microservice architecture. With Ambar, engineers don't have to spend time setting up and maintaining producers, consumers, message brokers, publishers, subscribers, exchanges, and more. Ambar provides event delivery and ordering guarantees out of the box, avoiding nasty bugs and allowing engineering teams to focus on business-critical work instead of managing infrastructure.

Ambar doesn't require a complicated SDK like Kafka's producer and consumer libraries because it reads from an outbox table and forwards payloads via HTTP. It is language and library-agnostic, with low latency and infinite storage, enabling fast historical replays and avoiding time-consuming backfills.

Ambar's properties prevent critical application issues and make it easier and faster to deploy EDMs. Here are five examples of what happens without the properties Ambar provides:

1. A pharmacy processes two events that amend a medical prescription in the wrong order, and a patient overdoses.

2. A bank takes two weeks to release an amendment to account balances because the associated bug fix required a lengthy backfill that reprocessed all events from the beginning of time.

3. A supermarket does not dispatch an event about shelves running low on baby formula, leaving parents frustrated when they cannot find milk for their baby.

4. A shipping company takes nine months to release a package tracking feature because every team involved must learn and integrate a new stream processing library.

5. A concert ticket sale cannot keep up with online demand because the underlying EDM's messaging layer cannot scale, favoring ticket scalpers who had bought tickets at pre-release.
   
   

None of these problems would occur with Ambar. By leveraging Ambar, organizations using EDMs increase efficiency, avoid errors, and accelerate development speed—improving the lives of engineering teams, their stakeholders, and their company's customers.