When a requirement involves new real‑time data, what issues should you consider when designing an event‑driven architecture?

First, define latency and throughput goals: real‑time systems often require sub‑second end‑to‑end latency and high message rates. Next, address data consistency: decide between eventual consistency with idempotent consumers or stronger guarantees using transactional outbox patterns. Schema evolution is critical; use a schema registry and enforce backward compatibility. Consider back‑pressure handling: implement consumer lag monitoring and throttling to prevent overload. Fault tolerance requires replayability; store events durably and design consumers to be idempotent. Security and governance: enforce encryption, authentication, and audit trails on the event stream. Finally, monitor and observability: instrument producers, brokers, and consumers with metrics, logs, and traces to detect bottlenecks and failures early. Balancing these factors ensures the architecture meets real‑time requirements while remaining maintainable.