Event bus
A central messaging system where events are published and multiple automations can subscribe to receive them. When a deal is won, an event is published to the bus billing, CS, and ops automations each react to it independently.
Expert insight
An event bus decouples the system producing an event from the systems reacting to it, a new system can subscribe to existing events without the producing system needing to know or change anything. The trade-off is debuggability: tracing what actually happened across a system with many event subscribers is harder than following a single linear workflow, since the causal chain fans out.
In a real workflow
Several services publish events such as "order.created" to an event bus, and each interested service subscribes.
Common mistakes
- Using an event bus for two simple systems.
- No schema for events.
Complexity level
Technical term used in production automation systems.
Related terms
Event-driven automation
An automation triggered by a real-time event rather than a schedule. A new email…
Queue
A buffer that stores automation tasks waiting to be processed. Queues absorb tra…
Async / Asynchronous processing
When an automation queues a task and continues without waiting for it to complet…
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