From Scheduler to Events: Rethinking Alerts in a Modular System

Many enterprise systems rely on a central scheduler to run alerts and notifications - until that scheduler becomes a bottleneck for change, reliability, and scalability. In this talk, I’ll share our ongoing journey of replacing a traditional scheduler-based approach with event-driven processing in a large, modular system. Instead of rewriting everything or introducing heavy infrastructure, we focused on changing the architecture step by step: decoupling alert logic, isolating failures per module, and moving from time-based execution to meaningful triggers. I’ll walk through the design decisions we made, the trade-offs we faced, and the mistakes we learned from while transforming how alerts are generated and processed. This session is not about a perfect end state, but about the real work of evolving a legacy system under real constraints and how small architectural shifts can lead to big improvements in resilience, clarity, and team ownership.