Change is inevitable: versioning event-driven systems with Laila Bougria

Hi everyone,

April is a busy month, I guess, but we couldn't leave out the opportunity to host Laila Bougria even if it is right before good Friday.

Change is inevitable: versioning event-driven systems
Building an event-driven system is anything but trivial. However, once you make it past the sea of pub-sub vs. command-response debates and the service boundaries conundrum, you'll soon face the inevitable: change. The conversations that follow sound all too familiar... "Who's subscribed to this message?" "Do other services depend on this field in the payload?" "Why on earth is that thing in the payload?" "That service should never rely on this data!" And, of course, the obvious "Can't we -just- remove this?"

But are those the right questions to ask? As software developers, we aim to be agents of change, not chaos. To achieve this, we need to understand the impact of tweaking a message contract without breaking half of the system or forcing other teams beyond their deadlines. Oh, and let’s not forget that we’re supposed to solve this problem with zero downtime, as our users are spread across every time zone. In this session, we’ll discuss techniques to prepare your event-driven systems for change, how to evolve contracts in ways that ensure compatibility, and finally, how CNCF's xRegistry project will impact how we evolve event-driven systems in the future. Join me to find out how you can prepare event-driven system so that, next time a stakeholder approaches with a change request, your heart doesn't sink to the floor.

Laila Bougria
Laila Bougria is a Solutions Architect and Engineer with over 15 years of experience in the Microsoft .NET space. She's a keynote speaker, a Microsoft Azure MVP, and frequently shares her knowledge and insights at conferences worldwide. Currently, Laila is busy building NServiceBus at Particular Software and solving distributed riddles. When she's not immersed in complex problems or code, Laila enjoys indulging in her favorite pastime - knitting! She finds that tangling the yarn into beautiful patterns helps untangle her thoughts.