Event Streaming

Event streaming treats a business fact as data you can publish, retain, and process. An order placed, a payment authorized, and a device reading are events. They say that something happened at a point in time.

This changes how systems connect. A producer publishes an event to a named stream. Consumers read it independently. The producer does not need to know which consumers exist, and a new consumer can often read retained history.

A stream is not a database table, an RPC call, or a queue by default. It is an ordered record of events within a partition or shard. Ordering is normally scoped to that unit, not to an entire distributed system.