The Cascade Problem: How Kafka Solved the Microservices Dependency Crisis

When microservices are tightly coupled through direct HTTP calls, a single service failure cascades across the entire system—as this team discovered when a notification service outage took down order processing and billing simultaneously. Moving to Kafka-based event-driven architecture solved the resilience problem but introduced unexpected complexities: ensuring event ordering, handling duplicate deliveries, and implementing idempotent consumers.