Event-Driven Agents
Build reactive systems that respond to real-time events and triggers
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0 / 5 completedKey Takeaways
You've mastered the fundamentals of event-driven agents—reactive systems that listen for events, process them asynchronously, and scale horizontally. Let's recap the essential concepts.
React, Don't Poll
Event-driven agents sleep until events wake them up, making them far more efficient than agents that constantly poll for work. This reactive approach scales to handle millions of sporadic events.
The Event Loop Never Blocks
By continuously checking for events and dispatching handlers without waiting synchronously, the event loop enables concurrent processing even in single-threaded environments. Async operations happen "in the background" while the loop continues.
Pub-Sub Decouples Components
Publishers emit events to topics without knowing subscribers exist. Subscribers register interest in topics without knowing publishers. This loose coupling makes systems incredibly flexible—add new agents without changing existing code.
Windows Bound Infinite Streams
Stream processing uses windowing techniques (sliding, tumbling, session) to compute aggregates over unbounded data. Instead of storing everything, you analyze a moving window of recent events—perfect for real-time monitoring.
Events Are First-Class Citizens
In event-driven architectures, events aren't just notifications—they're the primary data structure. Event sourcing even stores events as the source of truth, allowing replay and audit trails.
Horizontal Scalability
Event-driven systems scale horizontally by adding more event processors. Message queues distribute events across multiple workers, and each can operate independently without coordination overhead.
Resilience Through Decoupling
When publishers and subscribers don't directly depend on each other, failures are isolated. If one subscriber crashes, others continue processing events. The message broker buffers events until services recover.
Time Is a First-Class Dimension
Stream processing explicitly handles event time vs processing time. Late-arriving events, out-of-order delivery, and watermarks ensure correct results even when network delays cause temporal chaos.
Async Is the Default
Event-driven agents embrace asynchrony—every operation returns immediately while work happens "eventually." This async-first mindset is essential for building responsive, scalable systems that don't block waiting for I/O.
Webhooks Bridge Systems
Webhooks are HTTP-based event notifications that let external systems trigger your agents. Combined with pub-sub, they create a universal event fabric connecting microservices, SaaS platforms, and IoT devices.
🎯 What's Next?
You now understand how event-driven architectures enable reactive, scalable agent systems. These patterns—event loops, pub-sub, and stream processing—are foundational for building production-grade agents that respond to real-world events.
In the next module, you'll explore human-in-the-loop systems—hybrid architectures where agents handle routine tasks but escalate complex decisions to humans. This combines agent automation with human judgment for the best of both worlds.