39. How do you build a cross-account event backbone with EventBridge?

Jun 2 2022 • 22 mins

When it comes to building and deploying microservice applications on AWS, there are 2 emerging best practices: use a separate AWS account per application (and environment) and decouple communication between separate systems using events (instead of point-to-point communication). Can we use these two best practices together? Yes, but we will need to find a way to pass messages between AWS accounts! In this episode we discuss how to do that using EventBridge as a cross-account event backbone! We discuss why these 2 suggestions are well established best practices, what are the pros and cons that they bring to the table, what an event backbone is and why EventBridge is a great service to implement one. Finally, we will discuss a case study and an example implementation of this pattern in the context of an e-commerce application built with a microservices architecture.

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

- Article “How to use EventBridge as a Cross-Account Event Backbone” https://dev.to/eoinsha/how-to-use-eventbridge-as-a-cross-account-event-backbone-5fik

- Repository with example code: https://github.com/fourTheorem/cross-account-eventbridge/

- Article “What can you do with EventBridge?” (fourTheorem blog): https://www.fourtheorem.com/blog/what-can-you-do-with-eventbridge

- For great ideas on structuring event payloads, take a read of Sheen Brisals' post on the Lego Engineering blog: https://medium.com/lego-engineering/the-power-of-amazon-eventbridge-is-in-its-detail-92c07ddcaa40

- Article “What do you need to know about SNS?” (fourTheorem blog) which includes a comparison of SNS and EventBridge: https://www.fourtheorem.com/blog/what-do-you-need-to-know-about-sns

- AWS Bites Episode 23: “What’s the big deal with EventBridge?” : https://youtu.be/UjIE5qp-v8w

- AWS Community Day talk by Luc van Donkersgoed “Event-Driven Architecture at PostNL Scale”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyoMF1AEI7g

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