Chapter 1. Introducing event streams
This chapter covers
- Defining events and continuous event streams
- Exploring familiar event streams
- Unifying event streams with a unified log
- Introducing use cases for a unified log
Believe it or not, a continuous stream of real-world and digital events already powers the company where you work. But it’s unlikely that many of your coworkers think in those terms. Instead, they probably think about their work in terms of the following:
- The people or things that they interact with on a daily basis—for example, customers, the Marketing team, code commits, or new product releases
- The software and hardware that they use to get stuff done
- Their own daily inbox of tasks to accomplish
People think and work in these terms because people are not computers. It is easy to get up in the morning and come to work because Sue in QA really needs those reports for her boss by lunchtime. If we stopped and started to think about our work as creating and responding to a continuous stream of events, we would probably go a little crazy—or at least call in to the office for a duvet day.
A company is an organization that generates and responds to a continuous stream of events.