Event-driven architectures look great on paper (or a whiteboard), but it’s not always clear how to implement them. The transformation from request/response based microservices to event-driven can seem daunting, but we don’t have to stop the world and change everything. Instead, we can transition an existing system gradually. In this talk, we’ll work through such a transition, using Apache Kafka and Python. We’ll learn how to introduce Kafka into an architecture and then gradually use it to make our application more efficient, less coupled, and much easier to evolve.