Module 01 · 4 lessons
Foundations and architectural decisions
Choose asynchronous boundaries, then connect Kafka partitions, consumer groups, ordering, and delivery semantics to business outcomes.
17-lesson production course
Follow an event from durable intent to verified business outcome.
Learn which boundary accepts a message, where duplicates and reordering appear, and which evidence proves publication, consumption, recovery, and user-visible completion.
Five ordered modules · approximately 5.5 hours
Build the reliability chain one boundary at a time.
Each module keeps broker guarantees, application transactions, external effects, and business recovery separate enough to test.
Module 02 · 4 lessons
Event contracts and reliable publication
Define stable envelopes and schemas, evolve them compatibly, and publish durable business facts through an operated outbox.
Module 03 · 4 lessons
Consumption, duplicates, ordering, and recovery
Make consumer effects duplicate-safe, configure bounded Spring Kafka recovery, and converge when records arrive late or more than once.
Module 04 · 4 lessons
Coordination and production operations
Coordinate long-running work and troubleshoot real event flows from durable intent through consumer state and user recovery.
Module 05 · 1 lessons
Interactive failure lab
Run deterministic crash, retry, acknowledgement, and idempotency scenarios, then connect each timeline to production evidence and recovery ownership.
Course library
Review every event-driven lesson.
Shared lessons keep one canonical article URL while their completion counts in every course that contains them.
System Design Aug 18, 2026 4 min read
Event-Driven Architecture Decisions Explained
Learn when event-driven architecture helps, where its reliability boundaries sit, and how to choose events, commands, state, and recovery contracts.
System Design Jun 29, 2026 5 min read
Message Queues Explained
Learn how message queues work in backend systems, including producers, consumers, retries, dead-letter queues, ordering, and idempotency.
System Design Aug 18, 2026 4 min read
Kafka Topics, Partitions, Consumer Groups, and Ordering
Understand Kafka topics, partition logs, keys, offsets, consumer groups, rebalances, and the exact boundaries of ordering and parallel processing.
System Design Jul 29, 2026 12 min read
Message Delivery Semantics Explained
Compare at-most-once, at-least-once, and exactly-once messaging by tracing producer, broker, consumer, acknowledgment, and side-effect failures.
System Design Aug 18, 2026 4 min read
Event Design with CloudEvents and AsyncAPI
Design stable event envelopes, payload schemas, channels, and operations with CloudEvents and AsyncAPI without confusing contracts with delivery guarantees.
System Design Aug 18, 2026 4 min read
Event Schema Evolution and Compatibility Explained
Evolve event payloads safely with explicit semantics, compatibility checks, tolerant readers, staged rollout, replay evidence, and deprecation boundaries.
System Design Jul 29, 2026 11 min read
Transactional Outbox Pattern Explained
Prevent database and message broker dual-write failures with a transactional outbox, PostgreSQL locking, and Java and Node.js publishers.
System Design Aug 18, 2026 4 min read
Reliable Event Publishing with Spring Boot and an Outbox
Build a Spring Boot transactional outbox that commits business state with publication intent, survives relay crashes, and exposes duplicate-safe evidence.
System Design Jul 29, 2026 11 min read
Idempotent Consumer Pattern Explained
Make at-least-once message processing duplicate-safe with PostgreSQL unique constraints, atomic business updates, and Java and Node.js consumers.
System Design Aug 18, 2026 4 min read
Reliable Spring Kafka Consumers: ACKs, Retries, and DLTs
Design Spring Kafka consumers around durable effects, offset and acknowledgment boundaries, bounded retries, dead-letter recovery, and idempotency.
System Design Jul 29, 2026 12 min read
Dead Letter Queue Explained
Design dead-letter handling with bounded retries, failure metadata, alerting, approved replay, and duplicate-safe Java and Node.js recovery workflows.
System Design Aug 18, 2026 4 min read
Event Ordering, Deduplication, and State Convergence
Keep event-driven state correct across duplicates and reordering with stable identity, entity versions, conditional updates, and explicit convergence rules.
System Design Jul 29, 2026 11 min read
Saga Pattern and Compensating Transactions Explained
Coordinate cross-service workflows with Saga choreography or orchestration, durable state, idempotent steps, compensation, and manual recovery.
System Design Jun 29, 2026 5 min read
Background Jobs Explained
Learn how background jobs work in backend systems, including queues, workers, retries, scheduling, idempotency, and monitoring.
API Design Jun 29, 2026 4 min read
Webhooks Explained
Learn how webhooks work in backend systems, including event delivery, signatures, retries, idempotency, and common design mistakes.
System Design Aug 18, 2026 4 min read
Production Kafka and Event-Driven Systems Troubleshooting
Troubleshoot event-driven incidents through user impact, producer acceptance, partition health, consumer progress, retries, and business reconciliation.
System Design Aug 18, 2026 8 min read
Message Delivery Semantics Lab: Crash, Retry, and Idempotency Examples
Run four deterministic delivery scenarios to see how ACK timing, crashes, retries, stable IDs, and DLQ boundaries change business outcomes.
FAQ
Event-Driven Systems course questions
Is this course specific to Kafka?
No. The reliability model is broker-neutral, while Kafka and Spring Boot provide concrete examples whose versioned boundaries are stated explicitly.
Does the course promise exactly-once business effects?
No. It distinguishes broker transactions from database and external side effects, then uses stable identity, idempotency, reconciliation, and recovery contracts.
What should I know before starting?
Basic HTTP, database transaction, and backend service knowledge is enough. The first module introduces the messaging concepts used later.