What they don’t tell you about event sourcing
I&#x27;ve worked with event sourced systems quite a bit in production and at scale, and have written a book on Akka and another one on related topics. While I have been an advocate of the approach, My experiences are guiding me away from implementing Event Sourcing in many use cases (especially where the entities are long lived). While CQRS is more complex, I&#x27;m more likely to implement CQRS without event sourcing, where an entity is responsible for its own persistence using whatever mechanism we deem suitable, and emits events that can be used for the view (or the data can be viewed as read only.) Ultimately a bounded context is there, and you send it commands and get out events. You have to evaluate the recovery and persistence mechanism based on your needs. Exactly once delivery is a pipedream so it doesn&#x27;t matter how you&#x27;re persisting the event and delivering it, evaluating line by line, crashing somewhere it&#x27;s going to be possible to emit an event twice somewhere (eg if the outbound projection emits the event but doesn&#x27;t persist its offset.) You need to deduplicate somewhere to get exactly once processing semantics. There _are_ simpler approaches to persistence that work just fine with the same delivery guarantees that work fine in the place of Event Sourcing. Nobody talks about any alternatives though - everyone defaults to event sourcing. My intuition guides me to look at other options having been burned one too many times, watching organizations collapse around 100% event sourced applications, etc.<p>I&#x27;m still working on event&#x2F;message driven systems (today with Elixir mostly) but I&#x27;ve started to make architectural compromises to move away from especially event sourcing. Event Sourcing + CQRS may be prescriptive but it&#x27;s very hard for new developers to pick up and understand the layers of abstraction underneath eg Akka + the Persistence Journal. And I&#x27;m not sure I can trust many of the open source libraries outside of Akka to be honest. I&#x27;ve had to dig into the depths of postgres journal implementations and apply windowing to journal queries for example because they weren&#x27;t burned in at the scale I was working with (partially because I inherited an application with a single entity in a context which had many million line long journals - this highlights a design error though but hopefully you can see my point.)<p>You don&#x27;t _need_ to use these patterns but you can still apply DDD and event&#x2F;message based abstractions, and publish events. An entity can write its state to a record and then apply the state in memory as well without using a journal given you handle exactly once processing semantics correctly. This means there are knobs and dials. The problem with event sourcing in the greater picture is that it&#x27;s descriptive of an approach, and there aren&#x27;t many clear alternatives that people are talking about that work in similar system designs. If you have very long lived entities, or only a few of them, it gets especially difficult to keep the system alive over time, but for those use cases it doesn&#x27;t mean you should stop receiving commands and emitting events.<p>You always here about the idea of the approach, never the reality of maintaining these systems, or the inappropriate use. In one implementation, there is one entity that receives thousands of events a day, and lives forever. How do you maintain the journal while changing the code, keep it alive over time? I&#x27;ve watched event sourcing and CQRS sink projects and teams. I&#x27;ve watched well paid contractors unable to figure out how to cluster and scale these systems. The barrier to entry for people to become effective can be high and you should understand the long view in terms of people required and cost over time and validate the approach for your use case very carefully. Again, the fact that everyone talks about event sourcing and no closely related alternatives makes it seem like the gold standard or the only option but there are other (simpler) ways to deal with your persistence in an overall similar architectural approach.