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A few months ago, we announced Axon Server 2025.0 with built-in HTTP and R-Socket interfaces—opening the door for developers in any language to dispatch and handle messages across microservices and distributed systems. Today, with the release of Axon Server 2025.1, we’re excited to introduce support for Dynamic Consistency Boundaries (DCB). Let’s take a closer look at what that means.
You now can have more flexibility in your Event-Sourced applications.
What if your event-sourced system could evolve with your business—rather than forcing your logic into rigid technical boundaries? That’s exactly what Dynamic Consistency Boundary (DCB) brings to Axon Server 2025.1: real architectural flexibility for event-sourced applications.
Traditional systems lock you into aggregate boundaries early on, often for the lifetime of the application. DCB shifts this by letting you define consistency boundaries per operation. Your architecture can now adapt as your understanding of the domain grows—without the performance penalties of cross-aggregate transactions.
For enterprise teams, this means less time spent in “analysis paralysis” and more room to iterate. You can start with good-enough boundaries, then refine them as you go—perfectly aligning with agile, adaptive development.
Event Tagging allows you to go beyond single aggregate boundaries
So how does Event Tagging in DCB make all this possible? Traditional event sourcing ties each event to a single aggregate ID—creating rigid one-to-one relationships that rarely match real-world business complexity. Event Tagging changes that by letting each event carry multiple semantic labels describing what happened.
Take e-commerce: when a customer places an order, legacy systems force you to store that event under either the Customer or Order aggregate. With DCB, the event can be tagged with customer ID, order ID, product category, region, payment method, and shipping destination—all at once. No duplication, just richer context.
If Event Tagging feels unfamiliar, think of database indexes: instead of scanning a column, the system checks an index to find what it needs—faster and more flexible. That’s the power of tagging, especially as your business evolves.
Say you start by modeling around customers, but later shift to account-based selling. With traditional aggregates, this shift might demand a major rearchitecture. With tagging, you just start adding account tags—and even retag historical events—making your entire event history instantly queryable from both customer and account perspectives.
Future-Proofing your Event-Sourced architecture by “killing the aggregate”
Perhaps the most compelling long-term benefit of DCB is how it future-proofs your event-sourced applications. How many times have you wished you could restructure your aggregates after gaining deeper domain insights into the nature of your application? DCB makes this not just possible, but straightforward.
Because events are tagged, you can adapt consistency boundaries as your business evolves—without losing historical data or triggering complex migrations. Events stay immutable and accurate, while their organization becomes flexible.
This isn’t just technical agility—it’s a mindset shift. DCB lets teams iterate on domain models over time, refining architecture based on real-world usage. Early decisions aren’t set in stone, because they don’t have to be.
What can I do with DCB in Axon Server 2025.1?
The first question many developers ask is simple: what can I actually build with this release? If you're already using Axon Framework 5.0, you can now experiment with the aggregate-less approach DCB enables—something we've discussed for years. That means you can finally get hands-on with defining consistency boundaries dynamically.
However—and this is key—Axon Server 2025.1 with DCB is for experimentation and early feedback, not production use. We’re releasing it now so adventurous developers can explore its potential and help shape the production-ready version through real-world feedback.
The biggest limitation? No data migration support. If you're running an existing Axon Server instance, you can't migrate existing contexts to use DCB. You'll need to create new contexts specifically for DCB experimentation. While restrictive, this is by design—to prevent accidental migration of production data to an experimental feature set.
Another missing piece is retagging. DCB supports tagging events with multiple labels instead of a single aggregate ID. But what happens when business requirements change and you need to adjust those tags? Retagging lets you update historical event tags without changing the event content—crucial for long-term adaptability. This feature isn’t yet available in this release.
Also missing is snapshot support, which means you can’t preserve validation model states and must rebuild them each time. And several context-level features—like multi-tier storage and event transformations—are not yet supported. Once events are created, they can’t be modified in this release.
Getting started with DCB in Axon Framework 5.0
Axon Server 2025.1 is fully compatible with any current version of Axon Framework 5.0, which includes all the necessary APIs for DCB. This synchronized release ensures that when you're ready to experiment, you have the full stack—framework and server—at your fingertips.
Axon Framework provides the developer-friendly APIs and programming models, while Axon Server handles the full event lifecycle and storage.
Download Axon Server 2025.1 and start exploring DCB today!
Community feedback and involvement
The success of DCB relies on community feedback during this experimental phase. We invite developers to not only try the features but also share experiences, challenges, and insights on the AxonIQ Discuss server.
Your input directly shapes development priorities and ensures the production release meets real-world needs. Whether you hit unexpected issues, uncover new use patterns, or spot missing features, your feedback helps guide the future of event-sourced architecture in Axon.
The development team is listening—now’s the time to speak up.
Final thoughts
Axon Server 2025.1 is officially here, and we can’t wait to see what event-driven applications you’ll build with it.
New to Axon Server? Check out the Axon Server 2025.0 announcement to see how it supports developers in any programming language. And don’t miss the AxonIQ blogs page for more insights from the team on what’s possible with Axon Server.
Let’s build the future of event-sourcing—together.
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!
