Event Infrastructure for Modern Systems
The old event model is breaking
Over the past decade, event-driven architecture became a go-to design pattern — and for good reason. It let us build scalable systems, decouple services, and respond to real-world complexity with real-time reactions.
But the event systems we’re still using today? They were built for a different era — batch systems, slow-moving services, synchronous-by-default thinking.
Now, in the AI era, they’re straining under new demands:
- Agent-based architectures flooding systems with unpredictable events
- An agent asked to “research competitors” might generate a dozen parallel web searches, summarise each result, and trigger additional subtasks to verify facts. Multiplying events with each iteration.
- A single hallucinated tool call can cause repeated retries or fallback invocations, ballooning the number of outbound calls (and failures) in unpredictable ways.
- Agents with memory or planning components might revise goals mid-execution based on partial results, spawning entirely new workflows that weren’t part of the original intent.
- Asynchronous-first design becoming the new norm
- Scale, concurrency, and reliability expectations all higher than ever
Old-school event infrastructure wasn’t designed for this world, and engineering leaders are feeling the pain. CTOs and VPs of Engineering are discovering that their event architecture has become a hidden liability — one that threatens system reliability, erodes developer productivity, and creates unpredictable operational costs.
The hidden complexity behind every event
If you’ve operated any sizeable backend, you already know:
Handling events correctly is brutally hard.
- Retries: What happens if a consumer crashes mid-processing?
- Dead Letters: Where do failed events go — and do you even know they failed?
- Rate Limits: How do you handle spikes without dropping critical events?
- Observability: How do you debug when an event silently disappears?
Every team eventually invents their own partial answers: custom retry loops, dead-letter queues duct-taped onto brokers, endless alerting for missing events.
The result? A tangled mess of glue code, operational burden, and brittle assumptions that crumble under real-world pressure.
For engineering leaders, this translates to increased operational risk and unpredictable engineering costs. One VP of Engineering told me they had three engineers working full-time just to maintain their event infrastructure — none of them building new features, all of them fighting fires.
For platform engineers and infrastructure specialists, it means constantly rebuilding the same reliability patterns across every service, with incomplete visibility into whether they’re actually working.
Agents have changed the game
In traditional apps, events were often rare — user signup, purchase completed, etc. Now, AI-driven systems generate orders of magnitude more events:
- Agents polling APIs asynchronously
- Systems chaining reasoning steps through intermediate events
- Workflows retrying, adapting, branching in real time
This flood of events is not optional — it’s how AI-native systems work.
But the infra hasn’t evolved. We’re still using tools designed for nightly ETL pipelines to move real-time agent decisions across the wire. It’s like trying to drive a Formula 1 race with a horse-drawn carriage.
A CTO building an agent-based customer service system discovered their event volume increased by 50x compared to their traditional application. Their existing infrastructure simply couldn’t handle the load — not because of raw throughput, but because of the complex patterns of interdependent events that traditional systems weren’t designed to handle.
The case for a simpler, stronger backbone
We don’t need fancier tools — we need the right primitives:
- At-least-once delivery without complex manual retries
- Automatic backpressure and scaling without ops intervention
- Built-in observability at the event level, not just service logs
- Open standards that don’t tie you to a broker, cloud, or specific runtime
Teams shouldn’t have to build this themselves — gluing together queue brokers, retry managers, and dead-letter handlers piecemeal. They should get it out of the box, and they should get it in a form that fits how modern systems actually operate.
For platform engineers, this means no more rebuilding reliability patterns across every service. For engineering leaders, it means reduced operational risk and more predictable scaling costs.
A painless migration path
One of the biggest challenges with infrastructure is the cost of switching. That’s why we designed Sailhouse for incremental adoption:
- Start small: Begin with a single event type or service — no need to migrate everything at once
- Run in parallel: Use Sailhouse alongside your existing infrastructure during transition
- No downtime required: New events can flow through Sailhouse while legacy events continue on your current system
- Minimal code changes: Our libraries work with your existing event producers and consumers
For CTOs and VPs of Engineering worried about the risk of changing infrastructure, this incremental approach minimises disruption while still delivering immediate benefits.
How we’re thinking about it at Sailhouse
At Sailhouse, we believe the event backbone should be invisible when it works, giving you reliability, resilience, and observability without eating your engineering team’s bandwidth.
We built Sailhouse to be:
- Lightweight: Works with any backend, any agent framework, any compute.
- Declarative: You define what should happen — we handle the how.
- Production-First: Retries, rate limits, dead letters, observability — all included.
- Developer-Friendly: No ops army needed. No black-box pain points.
We’re not trying to replace your architecture. We’re trying to make it sane again.
Event infrastructure isn’t optional anymore
Whether you’re building agent systems, orchestrating async workflows, or scaling microservices your event backbone matters more than ever.
- If it’s fragile, your product is fragile.
- If it’s resilient, your product is resilient.
Which do you want?
If it’s invisible, your team moves faster! It’s time to expect more from your event infrastructure. We are.
For engineering leaders, the question isn’t whether you need reliable event infrastructure, it’s whether you want to build and maintain it yourself, or use something purpose-built for modern systems. For the engineers building these systems, it’s about reclaiming time that could be spent on creating value instead of gluing together infrastructure.
Ready to build on a better foundation?
Take the next step with Sailhouse:
- Book a chat if you need help — Let’s review your current event architecture and identify quick wins
- Start a proof-of-concept — See how Sailhouse integrates with your specific stack by signing up and using our docs
Many teams start seeing benefits within days, not months. And with our incremental migration approach, you can prove the value before committing to a full transition.