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Earlier this month, our team released Axon Server 2025.0, which includes some groundbreaking capabilities that enable developers to build robust event-sourced applications and services. Sometimes, we meet with development teams or product managers who are unfamiliar with what Axon Server can do and may be new to the event sourcing paradigm.
This blog summarizes the responses to some of their most frequently asked questions.
What is event sourcing, and how is it different from how I use my database?
Simply put, event sourcing is a new paradigm for data persistence in enterprise applications and services. Traditional database applications focus on inserting and updating rows within tables of the database. Event sourcing provides a different approach, where all significant occurrences within your application are stored as immutable events within a software system called an event store (which is analogous to a database).
What is Axon Server, and how does it work?
Axon Server is a unique tool for enterprise developers that works both as an Event Store and a message router. The image below gives you a good idea of how it’s the best of both worlds:
As an event store, Axon Server works like a database to persist all your events, which you can use to query later for your applications. As a message router, it works like Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ. Therefore, applications and services can use it to communicate with each other and scale seamlessly.
Do I need to deploy my apps to Axon Server?
No - Axon Server is not an application server. Therefore, all your applications and services remain exactly where you already run them (e.g. a Java-based Spring Boot pod in Kubernetes, a .NET container on MS Azure, a Rust binary on bare metal, or even a serverless AWS Lambda function). Think of Axon Server the same way you think of Postgres or Kafka: it is a shared infrastructure service that your code connects to, not a target you deploy your code into. Therefore, just like a database or a message router, all you need to do is to establish a connection with Axon Server within your own application, and the message routing and the event persistence will be handled for you.
Is Java required to use Axon Server?
Previous versions of Axon Server predominantly required applications and services to be written in Java to fully utilize its capabilities as a message router and an event store. However, with Axon Server 2025.0, this is no longer the case. Developers of any programming language (Go, C# .NET, JavaScript, Python, Rust, Swift, etc.) can send and receive any and all message types from Axon Server.
What are the ramifications of this? Well, for example, a payment microservice written in Python on Linux can dispatch a command to an inventory service written in C# on Windows, receive the resulting events, and project them into a React dashboard running TypeScript—all without custom bridges or other frameworks.
Final thoughts
Axon Server 2025.0 is officially here, and we can’t wait to see the event-driven applications you plan to create with it. Feel free to read the Axon Server 2025.0 announcement to learn how Axon Server allows any developer of any programming language to get started with event sourcing quickly. Also, be sure to check out the AxonIQ blogs page for more articles from the team about what you can do with Axon Server.
Looking for help on jumpstarting your event-sourced app with Axon Server? Feel free to use this form to book a chat with one of our solution architects to let us know what you’re working on. We’ll happily to show you step-by-step on getting your project off the ground. We’re happy to help your organization adapt to event sourcing, so feel free to contact us!
