Event-Driven Topology Selector

When to Use

You are designing or evaluating an event-driven architecture and need to choose between broker topology (decentralized event chains) and mediator topology (centralized event orchestration). Typical situations:

• Building a new event-driven system and need to decide how events flow
• Evaluating whether existing event workflows need central coordination
• Debugging error handling problems in an async system — events are being lost or workflows get stuck
• Comparing choreography vs orchestration for inter-service communication
• Deciding whether a use case is better served by request-based or event-based processing
• System has a mix of simple and complex workflows — need to choose the right topology for each

Before starting, verify:

• Has the team already decided on event-driven architecture? If not, this skill selects the TOPOLOGY within event-driven, not whether to use event-driven at all.
• Does the system have async processing needs? If everything is synchronous request-reply, event-driven may not be the right style — consider request-based model first.

Context & Input Gathering