streaming-event-architect

name

streaming-event-architect

description

Design the INTERNAL event/streaming data backbone between services and stores — topic/stream taxonomy, partitioning and key choice (ordering stated as "per key, unordered across keys"), delivery semantics stated honestly (at-least-once with idempotent consumers; "exactly-once" claims interrogated), consumer groups, retry/dead-letter policy with replay procedure, retention vs compaction, backpressure/lag handling, event-schema compatibility rules, and CDC ingestion from operational stores. This is the data PIPELINE inside the system; the external contract surface — public webhooks, partner event feeds, signed envelopes, tenant-scoped subscriptions — is api-event-architect and stays there. Use when designing internal event flow, choosing stream vs queue, fixing ordering/duplicate bugs, or designing CDC. Do NOT use for the audit trail (audit-log-architect) or deciding which workloads leave the operational store (operational-vs-analytical-splitter).

Streaming Event Architect

Purpose

Event pipelines fail in ways request/response systems never do: messages arrive twice, out of order, late, or land in a dead-letter queue nobody drains, and every one of those is a DESIGN outcome, not bad luck. This skill produces the internal streaming backbone design — topics, keys, partitions, delivery semantics, consumer layout, DLQ and replay, retention, schema compatibility, and CDC ingestion — with each guarantee stated honestly (what is ordered, relative to what key; what deduplicates, and where). It owns the pipe BETWEEN internal components. The moment an event crosses to an external consumer — a partner webhook, a public feed — the contract belongs to api-event-architect, and this skill designs only how the internal stream feeds it.

Use When

• Use when: designing or overhauling how services exchange events internally — new event backbone, stream vs queue choice, topic layout.
• Use when: duplicate processing, out-of-order effects, growing consumer lag, or an overflowing dead-letter queue point to delivery-semantics design debt.
• Use when: designing CDC (change data capture) from an operational store into streams — including when operational-vs-analytical-splitter prescribed CDC and the transport now needs designing.
• Use when: event payload schemas keep breaking internal consumers and compatibility rules (registry, additive-only policy) need defining.
• Do NOT use when: the events are a PUBLIC or partner-facing contract — webhook delivery, signed envelopes, subscription scoping, external versioning/deprecation policy are api-event-architect; this skill stops at the boundary where the internal stream hands events to that layer.
• Do NOT use when: the "events" are the compliance audit trail — actor/ action/outcome records with tamper-evidence and retention are audit-log-architect, even if they physically ride a stream.
• Do NOT use when: deciding WHETHER analytics/reporting workloads should move off the operational store — that decision is operational-vs-analytical-splitter; this skill designs the CDC/event transport after the split is decided.
• Do NOT use when: the payload evolution question is about DATABASE schema (tables/columns with deployed readers) — that is schema-evolution-planner.
• Do NOT use when: the concern is the worker EXECUTION model that consumes the stream — per-job retry/backoff, visibility timeouts, DLQ ownership, and tenant fairness are background-job-orchestration-architect; or live push to CLIENT connections (subscribe-time authz, fan-out, reconnect/replay) — that is realtime-subscription-architect. This skill designs the transport both consume, not what runs on top of it.

Inputs to Inspect

1. The event inventory as it exists: what is published today, by whom, consumed by whom, at what volume and peak rate — from code, queue/topic configs, and any existing event docs.
2. Ordering and consistency requirements per flow: which effects must be sequenced (per entity? per tenant? globally?) and which are commutative.
3. Consumer failure behavior today: retry loops, DLQ existence and drain procedure (or absence), poison-message history.
4. The operational stores feeding CDC: write rates, transaction boundaries, and whether ordering across tables matters downstream.
5. Tenant model constraints (from multi-tenant-data-architect outputs if present): whether streams are tenant-mixed with keyed isolation or tenant-separated, and what tenant context every event must carry.
6. Existing schema/contract conventions: any registry or payload versioning already in force, and api-event-architect artifacts for events that ultimately feed external surfaces.

Workflow

1. Inventory flows and classify each. For every producer→consumer flow: fire-and-forget notification, state-transfer (fact/event-carried state), or command. Volume, peak rate, and fan-out. Misclassified commands-as-events are a standing source of coupling — flag them.
2. Choose the transport shape per flow. Durable log/stream (replayable, multi-consumer, ordered per partition) vs work queue (competing consumers, ack/redeliver) — by fan-out, replay need, and ordering need. State the choice per flow, not one global answer.
3. Design keys and partitions. The partition key defines the ONLY ordering guarantee: state it as "ordered per , unordered across keys". Key by the entity whose effects must sequence (commonly entity-id; tenant-id alone creates hot partitions for large tenants — note skew). Estimate partition counts from peak rate and consumer parallelism, with headroom for rebalancing.
4. State delivery semantics honestly. Default: at-least-once delivery with IDEMPOTENT consumers (dedup key = event id or business key; dedup-store retention stated). Interrogate any "exactly-once" requirement: end-to-end exactly-once across arbitrary side effects is not purchasable — what exists is transactional produce/consume within one platform plus idempotent effects at the edges. Design the idempotency mechanism per consumer.
5. Design failure paths. Retry policy (attempts, backoff, what distinguishes retryable from poison), dead-letter destination per consumer group, DLQ ownership (who is paged, drain SLA), and the REPLAY procedure: how a drained/fixed message re-enters, how a consumer replays a time/offset range, and what makes replay safe (the same idempotency from step 4).
6. Set retention and compaction. Per topic: time/size retention for event history vs compaction for latest-state-per-key; replay window consumers can rely on; storage cost note. Compaction changes semantics (intermediate events vanish) — mark topics where that is unacceptable.
7. Define schema compatibility rules. Registry discipline (schemas versioned and checked at produce time where tooling allows), additive- only within a major version, required-field addition = new major with a parallel-publish window, consumer tolerance rules (ignore unknown fields). Deprecation of an event version follows a stated window, and external-feeding events defer to api-event-architect's contract.
8. Design CDC ingestion where prescribed. Capture mechanism (log-based preferred over polling — state why per store), transaction boundary handling, initial-snapshot + streaming handoff, and schema drift behavior (upstream DDL vs the stream schema — coordinate with schema-evolution-planner when the upstream table evolves).
9. Address backpressure and lag. Lag as a first-class signal per consumer group (alert threshold and owner — wiring via ), producer behavior when downstream is slow (buffer/block/shed, stated), and scaling rules for consumers.

Decision tables (stream vs queue, key choice, retention vs compaction, CDC mechanisms) and the per-flow guarantee card format: references/backbone-decision-sheet.md.

Output Format

STREAMING BACKBONE DESIGN — <system/domain>
Flows:          <N producer→consumer flows, classified>
Per-flow card:
  <flow>: transport=<stream|queue> key=<key> ordering="per <key> only"
  delivery=at-least-once + idempotent consumer (dedup=<mechanism>)
  retry=<policy> DLQ=<dest, owner, drain SLA> replay=<procedure>
  retention=<time/size|compacted> schema=<version, compat rule>
Partitioning:   <counts, skew notes (tenant hot-key risk)>
CDC:            <sources, mechanism, snapshot policy, drift handling> | n/a
Backpressure:   <lag thresholds/owners; producer behavior when slow>
Boundaries:     external contracts → api-event-architect; audit trail → audit-log-architect;
                split decision → operational-vs-analytical-splitter (consumed, not made here)
Explicit non-guarantees: <what this design does NOT promise (e.g., cross-key ordering)>

Validation Checklist

• Every flow has a stated ordering guarantee in "per , unordered across " form — no unscoped "ordered" claims.
• No unqualified "exactly-once" anywhere; every consumer has a named idempotency mechanism with dedup-store retention.
• Every consumer group has retry policy, DLQ destination, DLQ owner, and a replay procedure — no dead-letter black holes.
• Retention/compaction stated per topic with the replay window consumers may rely on.
• Schema rules cover both directions: producer evolution policy and consumer tolerance policy.
• Tenant context: events carry it; hot-partition risk from tenant keying is assessed.
• The external boundary is explicit: which events feed api-event-architect surfaces and where the handoff happens.
• Explicit non-guarantees section is present and honest.

Gotchas

• "Ordered" without a scope is a lie waiting to page you: streams order per partition key only. Cross-key and cross-topic sequencing requires design (sequence numbers, sagas), not assumption.
• Exactly-once marketing: platform transactions cover produce/consume within that platform; the moment a consumer touches an external system, you are back to at-least-once + idempotency. Say so in the design.
• Tenant-id as partition key concentrates your largest tenant on one partition — the noisy-neighbor problem reappears INSIDE the pipe. Key by entity within tenant, or accept and monitor the skew.
• DLQs without owners are where events go to die silently; a DLQ is only a safety mechanism if drain has an owner and an SLA.
• Replay without idempotency is an incident generator — replaying a day of events double-applies every non-idempotent effect.
• Compaction deletes history by design: a consumer needing every transition cannot read a compacted topic. Classify topics before enabling it.
• CDC initial snapshots on large tables can hammer the source store — snapshot strategy is part of the design, and its execution belongs in a data-migration-runbook-author runbook when it is a one-time move.
• Schema registries enforce shape, not meaning: a field renamed via delete+add passes additive checks while breaking every consumer semantically. Compatibility rules need review, not just tooling.

Stop Conditions

• The events under design are actually a partner/public contract (signing, subscription management, external versioning) → stop and route to api-event-architect; designing them here creates a second, conflicting contract surface.
• A hard "exactly-once end-to-end" requirement survives interrogation as a business mandate → halt and surface the honest options (transactional scope limits + idempotent edges) to a human; do not paper over it with an unqualified guarantee.
• Ordering requirements conflict with throughput requirements (global ordering demanded at a volume one partition cannot carry) → present the tradeoff explicitly and stop for a human decision.
• The tenant-isolation posture for streams is undefined (mixed streams vs per-tenant separation has compliance implications) → obtain the tenant model from multi-tenant-data-architect outputs or a human before fixing keys and topics.
• Asked to also implement broker/platform configuration changes on live infrastructure → decline execution; this skill designs, and live config changes follow the repo's approval path.

Supporting Files

• references/backbone-decision-sheet.md — stream-vs-queue decision table, key-choice and skew analysis, retention vs compaction table, CDC mechanism comparison, per-flow guarantee card.
• evals/evals.json — behavior cases including the ordering-scope edge and the exactly-once refusal.
• evals/trigger-evals.json — discrimination against api-event-architect (THE seam), audit-log-architect, operational-vs-analytical-splitter, and schema-evolution-planner.