Event Driven Architecture: An Exploratory Study on The Gap between Academia and Industry

Due to their applicability in different domains, Internet of Things software solutions have gained significant attention in many industries. Suitable architectures are needed in order to satisfy the needs of such applications. Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) ease the exchange of data between IoT devices while making each one of them completely decoupled from the others. EDA has been described in many studies and some industrial solutions are proposed to support such architecture. However, no study has evaluated the gap between the developed theory and the proposed industrial solutions. In this exploratory study, we selected and analyzed three industrial platforms according to what is described in the literature. Our results show that there is a lack of a unified definition of the elements of an EDA in academic studies. We also found that event-based communication is implemented differently in each platform, serving different use cases, which indicates the need to establish a commonly accepted definition and design-methodology for this type of architecture.