Building PulseCart: Event-Driven Architecture on GCP

A hands-on series building PulseCart, a fictional e-commerce platform, using GCP's managed event-driven stack — Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, Cloud Run, and Airflow — instead of self-managed Kafka. Each post tackles a real production concern: event taxonomy design, delivery semantics, retries and dead-letter handling, batch orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, and observability. Written from real experience building systems that process millions of events and terabytes of data daily, this series is for engineers who want to see event-driven architecture built the way it actually gets built in production, not as a hello-world demo.