# REL04-BP02 Implement loosely coupled dependencies
Dependencies such as queuing systems, streaming systems, workflows, and load balancers are loosely coupled. Loose coupling helps isolate behavior of a component from other components that depend on it, increasing resiliency and agility.
If changes to one component force other components that rely on it to also change, then they are *tightly* coupled. *Loose* coupling breaks this dependency so that dependent components only need to know the versioned and published interface. Implementing loose coupling between dependencies isolates a failure in one from impacting another.
Loose coupling enables you to add additional code or features to a component while minimizing risk to components that depend on it. Also, scalability is improved as you can scale out or even change underlying implementation of the dependency.
To further improve resiliency through loose coupling, make component interactions asynchronous where possible. This model is suitable for any interaction that does not need an immediate response and where an acknowledgment that a request has been registered will suffice. It involves one component that generates events and another that consumes them. The two components do not integrate through direct point-to-point interaction but usually through an intermediate durable storage layer, such as an SQS queue or a streaming data platform such as Amazon Kinesis, or AWS Step Functions.
![\[Diagram showing dependencies such as queuing systems and load balancers are loosely coupled\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/2022-03-31/framework/images/loosely-coupled-dependencies.png)
Amazon SQS queues and Elastic Load Balancers are just two ways to add an intermediate layer for loose coupling. Event-driven architectures can also be built in the AWS Cloud using Amazon EventBridge, which can abstract clients (event producers) from the services they rely on (event consumers). Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is an effective solution when you need high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging. Using Amazon SNS topics, your publisher systems can fan out messages to a large number of subscriber endpoints for parallel processing.
While queues offer several advantages, in most hard real-time systems, requests older than a threshold time (often seconds) should be considered stale (the client has given up and is no longer waiting for a response), and not processed. This way more recent (and likely still valid requests) can be processed instead.
**Common anti-patterns:**
+ Deploying a singleton as part of a workload.
+ Directly invoking APIs between workload tiers with no capability of failover or asynchronous processing of the request.
**Benefits of establishing this best practice:** Loose coupling helps isolate behavior of a component from other components that depend on it, increasing resiliency and agility. Failure in one component is isolated from others.
**Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established:** High
## Implementation guidance
+ Implement loosely coupled dependencies. Dependencies such as queuing systems, streaming systems, workflows, and load balancers are loosely coupled. Loose coupling helps isolate behavior of a component from other components that depend on it, increasing resiliency and agility.
+ [AWS re:Invent 2019: Moving to event-driven architectures (SVS308)](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/what-is-amazon-eventbridge.html)
+ [What Is Amazon EventBridge?](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/what-is-amazon-eventbridge.html)
+ [What Is Amazon Simple Queue Service?](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/welcome.html)
+ Amazon EventBridge allows you to build event driven architectures, which are loosely coupled and distributed.
+ [AWS New York Summit 2019: Intro to Event-driven Architectures and Amazon EventBridge (MAD205)](https://youtu.be/tvELVa9D9qU)
+ If changes to one component force other components that rely on it to also change, then they are tightly coupled. Loose coupling breaks this dependency so that dependency components only need to know the versioned and published interface.
+ Make component interactions asynchronous where possible. This model is suitable for any interaction that does not need an immediate response and where an acknowledgement that a request has been registered will suffice.
+ [AWS re:Invent 2019: Scalable serverless event-driven applications using Amazon SQS and Lambda (API304)](https://youtu.be/2rikdPIFc_Q)
## Resources
**Related documents:**
+ [AWS re:Invent 2019: Moving to event-driven architectures (SVS308)](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/what-is-amazon-eventbridge.html)
+ [Amazon EC2: Ensuring Idempotency](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/Run_Instance_Idempotency.html)
+ [The Amazon Builders' Library: Challenges with distributed systems](https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/challenges-with-distributed-systems/)
+ [The Amazon Builders' Library: Reliability, constant work, and a good cup of coffee](https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/reliability-and-constant-work/)
+ [What Is Amazon EventBridge?](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/what-is-amazon-eventbridge.html)
+ [What Is Amazon Simple Queue Service?](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/welcome.html)
**Related videos:**
+ [AWS New York Summit 2019: Intro to Event-driven Architectures and Amazon EventBridge (MAD205)](https://youtu.be/tvELVa9D9qU)
+ [AWS re:Invent 2018: Close Loops and Opening Minds: How to Take Control of Systems, Big and Small ARC337 (includes loose coupling, constant work, static stability)](https://youtu.be/O8xLxNje30M)
+ [AWS re:Invent 2019: Moving to event-driven architectures (SVS308)](https://youtu.be/h46IquqjF3E)
+ [AWS re:Invent 2019: Scalable serverless event-driven applications using Amazon SQS and Lambda (API304)](https://youtu.be/2rikdPIFc_Q)