Event Sourcing

Normal Behavior

Stores every state change as an immutable event, allowing the system to be rebuilt from scratch.

Failure Behavior

The event store grows to 50TB, and rebuilding the read models takes 3 weeks of continuous compute.

Business Consequence

Failure to accurately sequence or persist events in an Event Sourcing architecture irreparably corrupts the system's source of truth. Without a reliable append-only ledger, rebuilding application state becomes impossible, leading to severe financial discrepancies, audit failures, and the permanent loss of historical business context required for compliance and recovery.

Visual Manifestation

"The read-model projection lags thousands of events behind the write model, and replay logs show 'optimistic concurrency exception' or 'event schema validation failed'."

Satirical Behavior

"An architecture chosen because someone read a book about banks, which ensures that instead of just updating a row in a database, you now have to process 5,000 historical events just to find out a user's current email address."

Known Aliases

Technical Terminology

Failure Indicators