1.
Consider an e-commerce platform where, upon a customer placing an order, several critical actions must be performed:
- Payment Processing: The customer's payment needs to be authorized and captured.
- Inventory Update: The stock levels for the purchased items must be decremented.
- Shipping Notification: The shipping department needs to be notified to prepare the order for dispatch.
- Email Confirmation: A confirmation email needs to be sent to the customer.
Explain in detail how an event-driven architecture, specifically utilizing a message broker (such as Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ), offers significant advantages and is superior to a tightly-coupled, synchronous approach for this e-commerce order processing scenario. Your explanation should thoroughly cover the following aspects:
- Scalability
- Resilience
- Decoupling
- Fault Tolerance
- Maintainability
Provide a structured, well-reasoned answer with concrete examples where applicable, demonstrating a clear understanding of the architectural benefits.