Managed Event Services in the Cloud

Picking managed building blocks

Cloud providers offer the building blocks so you do not run every broker yourself. Event streams (logs): Apache Kafka as a managed service (Amazon MSK, Confluent Cloud, Aiven and others), Amazon Kinesis, Azure Event Hubs (which also exposes a Kafka-compatible endpoint), and Google Cloud Pub/Sub for global messaging. Queues and topics for commands: Amazon SQS and SNS, Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ (self-run or managed, such as Amazon MQ). Event routing: Amazon EventBridge, Azure Event Grid and Google Eventarc route discrete events by rules to functions and services. Workflow and saga orchestration: AWS Step Functions, Azure Durable Functions and Logic Apps, Google Workflows, and Temporal (self-hosted or cloud). CDC: Debezium, AWS DMS, Google Datastream. The patterns in this course are the same on every platform; managed services change who operates the infrastructure, plus limits, pricing and features such as ordering and retention.

Pattern-to-service map

A starting point; check each service's ordering, retention and throughput limits.

pattern                         AWS                    Azure                       Google Cloud
------------------------------  ---------------------  --------------------------  -------------------
event stream / replay           MSK, Kinesis           Event Hubs                  Pub/Sub (+ seek), Managed Kafka
command queue / work queue      SQS                    Service Bus queues          Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks
fan-out pub/sub                 SNS, EventBridge       Service Bus topics, Event Grid  Pub/Sub, Eventarc
saga orchestration              Step Functions         Durable Functions           Workflows
change data capture             DMS, Debezium on MSK   Debezium, Change Feed       Datastream

Read the limits page first

Message size limits, ordering guarantees, maximum retention and delivery semantics differ between services. A design that relies on 30-day replay or strict ordering must be checked against the chosen service before you commit.

Quick check: Which managed service type is the natural fit for orchestrating a multi-step saga with compensations?

• A workflow service such as AWS Step Functions or Google Workflows
• A CDN
• An object storage bucket
• A DNS zone