Today’s applications increasingly need to be integrated with a multitude of highly specialized cloud services including for payment processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, weather forecasting, and on and on. A modern cloud-native platform is needed for this integration, to support devops practices, fast and elastic scalability, and vast choices of development patterns. As well as, to move the business from synchronous messaging that waits for a reply before proceeding to messaging that allows for real-time automated action.

In contrast to traditional, rigid, three-tier (application server) architectures, synchronous exchange of information (request/reply), and static linear processes, event-driven architectures react quickly and can help you take advantage of new opportunities in the moment they arise.

This paper describes two huge advantages of combining microservices and Kafka: (1) Event-driven agility and (2) Faster time to market for application development.