For the first 12 years of Gwen Shapira’s career, she worked on relational databases, where she learned all about both their power and limitations. In her The New Stack Makers interview, Shapira, a system architect at Confluent, excitedly shares how event-driven architecture literally breaks down those limitations and redefines the boundaries of service responsibilities.

Event-driven architecture is part of the broader industry trend of separating components and streamlining processes so that releases are faster and organized around user activity. It's all about pulling apart applications into components — usually microservices — that you then chain together to better service business needs through the publishing of, listening to, and reacting to those events.