Illustrative workflow: an uploaded report emits a completion event. An extraction agent and a separate indexing service react to it. The uploader does not wait for both jobs to finish. The design still needs an owner for failed processing and a way to establish completion.
A webhook is one delivery mechanism; the architecture describes the wider arrangement of components. CloudEvents provides a common description of event data across protocols. Choosing that format does not decide how a particular system retains or recovers events.
Before adopting the pattern, specify delivery, ordering, replay and duplicate-processing requirements. Retrying an event must not repeat a protected side effect. A synchronous request-response flow can be simpler when the caller needs an immediate result and independent processing adds little value.
Sources
- Microsoft Azure Architecture Center: Event-driven architecture style — Explains producers, channels, consumers and asynchronous delivery/recovery tradeoffs; checked October 26, 2026.
- CloudEvents: Primer, version 1.0.2 — Describes events as facts about occurrences and delivery over different protocols; checked October 26, 2026.