What is event-driven architecture and what are its benefits?

Event-driven architecture uses events to trigger and communicate between decoupled services. Components: event producers, event channel (message broker), event consumers. Patterns: event notification (minimal data, consumer queries), event-carried state transfer (full data), event sourcing (events as source of truth). Benefits: loose coupling, scalability, real-time processing, audit trail. Challenges: eventual consistency, debugging complexity, event ordering. Technologies: Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS EventBridge. Foundation for reactive systems.