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Event-driven architecture

A design in which components communicate by producing and reacting to events, decoupled through brokers or queues, rather than calling each other directly.

Event-driven architecture is the natural shape of an IoT backend because devices already produce events: a reading, a door opening, a threshold crossed. Producers publish to a broker or message queue without knowing who consumes; storage, alerting, analytics and billing each subscribe independently. Adding a new consumer does not touch the existing ones, and a slow consumer does not block the others.

The decoupling has a price in observability. When nothing calls anything directly, tracing why an alert did not fire means following an event through several asynchronous hops, so correlation IDs and good logging are essential. Ordering and duplicate delivery also need explicit handling, which stream processing frameworks provide. The pattern underpins serverless IoT designs.

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