This is a balanced article and I appreciate the author’s treatment of the challenges. Part of my work is helping enterprise shops with n-tier architectures decouple services to allow for more resilience end to end. Everything the author states has crept up, some of the issues I consider the “nominal cost of resilience and independence”. Other issues are easily mitigated, such as the yak shaving required to get off the ground. Serverless solves the infra/config challenges. If an enterprise shop isn’t open to serverless I have no interest in discussing event sourcing or CQRS with them. It’s too much work otherwise.

For shops that are being crushed by fluctuations in concurrency, challenges with the uptime and p50 of partner teams, don’t have much of a choice but to go event sourced, optimistic, and eventually consistent.

I’m certain a great enterprise IT shop with great leadership could mitigate the challenges of service growth and instability with some clever optimizations of their current stacks but unfortunately I have to meet a shop that is uniformly competent.

Event sourcing helps with the competency gap problem. If every team’s data is on the outside my team can work around your lead time for changes or general ops incompetence. If inventory is down, fuck you I’m still taking orders. The extra work of maintaining a projection of your inventory events makes good business sense because time kills all deals.