Modern microservices architectures are event-driven, reactive, and choreographed (as opposed to being centrally controlled via an orchestrator). That makes them loosely coupled and easy to change. Right?
TL;DR: Not so easy! You will face challenges around understanding and managing the flow of events.
In this article I summarize my experience with choreographed microservices and look at various consequences and challenges of this approach. I use the typical business example of customer on-boarding (depending on the industry, this may be familiar to you as account opening). I use Apache Kafka to represent the event bus in the pictures below, but don’t worry if you run a different stack. The same concepts still apply.
Choreographed microservices
Let’s assume the following services and events form your choreographed system:
Camunda
Figure 1. Event-driven microservices forming a choreography.
