The architecture of web applications has changed a lot as the infrastructure evolves. Over the last decade, with the trend of migrating infrastructure from private data centers to a public cloud, increasing number of monolithic architectures have been replaced by microservice architectures.
Considering apps may not share the same computational space when it comes to the cloud, it's inevitable that local function invocations in monolithic apps have been replaced by other remote communication protocols, like REST APIs or RPC calls.
Such synchronous request-response pattern generally works well, but sometimes it doesn't. For example, in a chain of synchronous requests and responses, service A calls service B, service B calls service C, and calls go on. If each service needs 500ms to handle its business and there are 5 services in the chain, then you have to set the timeout of service A as 2500ms, while the service B needs 2000ms and 500ms for the last service in the chain.
In this article, we will introduce an alternative communication pattern (Event Driven Architecture) which enables asynchronous communication to avoid synchronous request chains. Then dive into the concepts of event-driven architecture and how you can better build it in the next generation cloud computing - Serverless computing.
