Bridging the discovery gap: the story behind event catalog and the future of EDA governance
One of the most powerful promises of Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) is business agility. When your systems are decoupled and communicate through events, you create an evolutionary architecture where new features can be added with astonishing speed. But this promise hinges on one critical, often overlooked, prerequisite: discoverability.
If your developers can't find the events, the entire model breaks down. This is the governance challenge that inspired David Boyne to create Event Catalog, an open-source tool designed to solve this very problem. We sat down with him on Talking Event-Driven to discuss his journey, the state of EDA tooling, and the future of governance.
The "Aha!" moment: from front-end patterns to business agility
David's journey into EDA began in an unlikely place: the front-end. Working with frameworks like Redux, he was already immersed in event-driven patterns without fully realizing it, dispatching actions, managing an event store, and replaying state.
The real lightbulb moment came when he moved to a startup and began working with serverless technologies like AWS EventBridge.
"The business agility I saw... that sparked my interest," David recalls. "I had these moments with a product owner where we'd ask for a new feature, but we would half the lead time because we already have the events there. We just piggyback off the events. For me, that was mind-opening."
This experience crystallized the core value of EDA: it wasn't just a technical pattern, but a powerful enabler for the business, breaking the cycle of tech being the "bad person in the room" slowing things down.
The core problem: how do you find the events?
As David dove deeper, he encountered the fundamental challenge that plagues so many EDA implementations at scale.
"The whole dream of event-driven architecture, in my opinion, is we have these events and messages that we can piggyback off to have this evolutionary architecture. But step one is finding them. If you can't find them, then that's the whole problem."
In an enterprise with hundreds of developers, how do teams discover the rich stream of events already flowing through the system? Without a central, accessible catalog, teams end up rebuilding what already exists, and the promise of agility evaporates. This discoverability gap was the inspiration for Event Catalog.
Building a solution: automated, agnostic, and integrated
Event Catalog was created to be a technology-agnostic solution for documenting and discovering events. It’s a static site generator at its core, but its real power lies in its flexibility and automation.
As David explains, the best way to use it is to integrate it directly into your workflow. "A lot of Event Catalog users are doing it this way. They automate builds off certain things like GitHub Actions... they have it in their CI/CD."
By connecting to sources of truth like a schema registry or Git repository, Event Catalog can:
- Automatically pull in the latest schemas (e.g., Avro).
- Version the events and schemas, creating a historical record.
- Generate change logs to provide crucial context about what has changed and why.
This turns documentation from a manual chore that's always out of date into an automated, living representation of your event landscape.
The future of EDA governance and tooling
David is candid about the state of the industry. "With event architectures... it seems like we're five, six years in the past compared to [REST APIs]," he notes. "The tooling is lacking, debugging is lacking, even the education in places is lacking."
The ecosystem is still catching up to the maturity of the OpenAPI/Swagger world. This is where tools like Event Catalog are looking to innovate. Future possibilities include:
- Deeper Integrations: Connecting with platforms like Backstage, Kafka, Flink, and Confluent.
- Proactive Notifications: If Event Catalog knows your schemas and consumers, it can automatically notify downstream teams of upcoming breaking changes.
- Enhanced Visualization: Moving beyond basic boxes and lines to provide rich, real-time visualizations of event flows.
- Design-Phase Tooling: Capturing the outputs of event storming sessions directly into the catalog, bridging the gap between design and documentation.
The goal is to create a tool that serves multiple personas, from the architect concerned with schemas to the business stakeholder who just wants to understand the flow of a process.
Conclusion: governance as an enabler
By making events easy to discover, understand, and consume safely, you unlock the speed and agility that EDA promises. Tools like Event Catalog are not just "nice to have", they are becoming an essential part of the modern EDA stack, ensuring that the architecture can scale without descending into chaos.
Struggling with event discovery and governance in your own architecture? We can help you build the tools and processes to succeed.
