Eventsourcing:apre-adoptionchecklistforlong-livedsystems

Teams ask regularly whether event sourcing is the right default. In our experience it is not. Where it is justified, teams often underestimate schema evolution, snapshot strategy, and replay cost for the first year of production.

We use a six-item checklist derived from multiple ledger-style systems. If fewer than four items pass, we recommend a simpler persistence model and revisit when constraints change.

Teams that keep event logs healthy treat the log as a first-class operational surface: monitoring, compaction, and replay drills are part of normal releases, not a one-time migration task.