Comparison
ConnectorvsEvent-carried state transfer
Connector
the sync broke because the vendor added a field, and the fix was in somebody else's code that you configure rather than edit.
A packaged piece of extraction or loading for a specific source or destination, configured rather than written. Buying rather than building these is nearly always right — the value is in the hundred edge cases of somebody's pagination and rate limiting — and the cost is that you inherit their opinions about schema, naming and incremental strategy. Every connector is a dependency with its own release notes, and treating one as infrastructure rather than as code is how a silent behaviour change reaches production.
Full entry →Event-carried state transfer
the event carries the whole customer record rather than just an id, so the consumer never has to call back and ask.
Publishing enough state inside each event that consumers can maintain their own copy without querying the producer. It removes the runtime coupling of a callback and makes replay meaningful, because the history contains the values and not just the pointers. The trade is size, staleness semantics and versioning: every consumer is now parsing your schema, so the payload is a contract in a way that an id was not.
Full entry →