Event-Driven Systems: A Practical Guide to APIs, Integration, and Modern Software Architecture (Site Reliability Engineering)

Modern software is no longer built as a single application running on a single server.

Today's enterprise systems are composed of dozens—or even thousands—of services connected through APIs, event streams, message brokers, and cloud platforms. Understanding how these systems communicate is now an essential skill for software developers, infrastructure engineers, architects, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), DevOps professionals, and IT leaders.

Event-Driven Systems provides a practical, architecture-first introduction to the technologies and design principles behind modern distributed applications. Rather than focusing on a specific programming language or cloud vendor, this book explains the enduring concepts that apply across today's software ecosystem.

Inside you'll learn how to:
• Understand Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) and when to use it
• Design clean, maintainable, and versioned APIs
• Build loosely coupled systems using events and messaging
• Choose between synchronous and asynchronous communication
• Apply proven Enterprise Integration Patterns
• Understand Kafka, RabbitMQ, cloud messaging, and event brokers conceptually
• Design resilient systems using retries, circuit breakers, timeouts, and bulkheads
• Implement observability with logs, metrics, tracing, SLOs, and error budgets
• Secure APIs and distributed services using modern authentication and authorization approaches
• Avoid common architectural anti-patterns that lead to distributed monoliths
• Connect architecture decisions to real business requirements

Written for experienced IT professionals entering modern software architecture, this book assumes familiarity with enterprise computing while requiring no prior experience with event-driven systems or microservices.

Whether you're a software engineer, platform engineer, systems administrator, infrastructure engineer, database professional, cloud architect, or technical manager, this guide will help you understand not just how modern systems work—but why they are designed the way they are.

Technology changes constantly.
Good architecture lasts.