Software Architecture for Developers - Advanced: Event-Driven Architecture and Production Engineering

Course Overview

This intensive 3-day advanced course builds on fundamental software architecture knowledge and deepens modern topics such as event-driven architecture, service mesh, observability, and performance engineering. Learn advanced deployment strategies, distributed tracing, chaos engineering, and how to operate highly available, scalable systems in production.

What You Will Learn

Day 1: Advanced Deployment & Service Mesh

Advanced Deployment Strategies
- Blue/Green Deployments
- Canary Releases
- Progressive Delivery (Argo Rollouts, Flagger)
- Shadow Traffic / Mirroring
- Rolling vs. Recreate (Kubernetes)
- Feature Flags (LaunchDarkly, Unleash)
Service Mesh & Advanced Traffic Management
- Istio / Linkerd Basics
- Traffic Shaping (Splitting, Mirroring)
- mTLS, Ingress/Egress, Sidecar Pattern
- Policy Enforcement & Telemetry
API Evolution & Backward Compatibility
- API Versioning Strategies (URI, Header, Media Types)
- Backward/Forward Compatibility Best Practices
- Consumer-Driven Contracts (Pact)
- Schema Registry (Avro, Protobuf)
- Rolling Updates without Breaking Clients

Day 2: Event-Driven Architecture & Distributed Systems

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)
- Event Brokers: Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SNS/SQS
- Event Streams vs. Queues
- Choreography vs. Orchestration
- Messaging Patterns: Saga Pattern, Outbox Pattern, Debezium CDC
- Event Sourcing & Idempotency
Streaming & Real-Time Processing
- Kafka Streams, ksqlDB
- Stream Partitioning & Consumer Groups
- Real-time Event Pipelines & Backpressure Handling
Data Consistency & Distributed Transactions
- Strong vs. Eventual Consistency
- CAP Theorem in Practice
- Optimistic vs. Pessimistic Concurrency
- Transactional Outbox, Change Data Capture (CDC)
- Saga Pattern Deep Dive (Orchestration vs. Choreography)
- Avoiding Dual Writes & Other Anti-Patterns

Day 3: Security, Observability & Performance Engineering

Advanced Security Concepts
- Zero Trust Architecture Deep Dive
- Service-to-Service Auth: mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE
- API Security Hardening (OAuth2 Scopes, WAF, OPA/Rego)
- Secrets Management (Vault, AWS KMS, K8s Secrets)
- Supply Chain Security (SLSA, SBOM, Sigstore Cosign, Image Signing)
Monitoring & Observability
- OpenTelemetry (Traces, Metrics, Logs)
- Distributed Tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin)
- Metrics & Dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana)
- Logging Pipelines (Loki, ELK/EFK)
- SRE Golden Signals & Alerting
Performance Engineering & Load Testing
- Testing Types: Load, Stress, Spike, Soak, Capacity
- Tools: k6, Locust, JMeter, Gatling
- Benchmarking Microservices (RPS, P99 Latency, Throughput)
- Bottleneck Analysis: Profiling, Flamegraphs, pprof
- Chaos Engineering (Gremlin, Chaos Mesh)
High Availability & Scalability
- Horizontal/Vertical Scaling Strategies
- K8s HPA/VPA/Cluster Autoscaler
- Multi-Region & Multi-Cluster Deployment Patterns
- Failover, Backup & Disaster Recovery Strategies

Prerequisites

Fundamental software architecture knowledge (ideally Basic course completed)
Experience with microservices and container technologies
Practical knowledge of Kubernetes
Understanding of REST APIs and asynchronous communication
Programming experience in at least one language
DevOps fundamentals (CI/CD, Docker)

Course Format

Duration: 3 full days (8 hours each)
Format: Instructor-led training with intensive hands-on labs
Class Size: Maximum 10 participants for intensive support
Materials: Advanced architecture patterns, code examples, and production templates included

Hands-on Labs and Exercises

During the course, you will work on advanced projects:

Blue/Green and Canary Deployment with Argo Rollouts
Service Mesh Setup: Istio installation and traffic management
Event-Driven System with Kafka: Producer, Consumer, Streams
Saga Pattern Implementation: Orchestration vs. Choreography
Schema Registry: Avro/Protobuf for API evolution
Zero Trust Setup: mTLS with SPIFFE/SPIRE
Distributed Tracing: OpenTelemetry with Jaeger integration
Performance Testing: k6 load tests and bottleneck analysis
Chaos Engineering: Failure injection with Chaos Mesh
Multi-Region Deployment: Implementing failover strategies

Tools and Technologies Used

In the course, we work with:

Event Streaming: Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB
Service Mesh: Istio or Linkerd
Progressive Delivery: Argo Rollouts, Flagger
Observability: OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki
Load Testing: k6, Locust
Security: Vault, SPIFFE/SPIRE, OPA
Chaos Engineering: Chaos Mesh, Gremlin
Feature Flags: Unleash or LaunchDarkly
Schema Registry: Confluent Schema Registry

Who Should Attend

Senior software engineers and architects
Platform engineers and SREs
DevOps engineers with architecture interest
Technical leads for microservices teams
Backend developers who want to deepen production skills
Anyone who has completed the Basic course and wants to continue learning

Learning Objectives

At the end of this course, you will be able to:

✅ Implement advanced deployment strategies (Blue/Green, Canary)
✅ Use service meshes for traffic management and security
✅ Design and implement event-driven architectures with Kafka
✅ Apply Saga Pattern for distributed transactions
✅ Ensure API versioning and backward compatibility
✅ Implement Zero Trust security in microservices
✅ Build distributed tracing and observability
✅ Perform performance testing and bottleneck analysis
✅ Use chaos engineering for resilience testing
✅ Manage data consistency in distributed systems
✅ Design multi-region high-availability systems
✅ Operate and optimize production-grade systems

Course Materials

All participants receive:

Advanced Software Architecture Material
Access to advanced lab environment (14 days)
Digital Advanced Certificate
Labs and Further Course Material
30 days post-course consulting support