Overview

Design and document an event-driven architecture (EDA) with this reference diagram template. Event-driven systems decouple producers and consumers through an event bus or message broker — enabling scalable, loosely coupled services that react to events asynchronously. This template maps producers, event channels, consumers, and supporting infrastructure on a shared engineering canvas.

Key Features

• Event producer service blocks with published event labels
• Central event bus / message broker component (Kafka, SNS, EventBridge, RabbitMQ)
• Event consumer service blocks with subscribed event labels
• Event schema annotation zones for documenting event payloads
• Dead letter queue and error handling paths

How to Use

1. Add event producer blocks on the left side using the Shapes tool — label each with the service name and the events it publishes using the Text tool
2. Draw the central event bus in the middle — add the broker name and any topic/channel structure
3. Add consumer service blocks on the right — label each with the events they subscribe to and the actions they trigger
4. Connect producers → broker → consumers using directional Connector arrows — label each arrow with the event name
5. Add dead letter queue blocks below the main flow and connect failed message paths using dashed Connector lines

Benefits

Event-driven architectures are powerful but invisible without a diagram. This template makes the full event flow legible — so engineers can trace a business action from the first published event to the last consumer response, and identify failure points before they become incidents.