@inproceedings{raptors2026-c028,
  title     = {{When Event-Driven Systems Become the Source of Truth: Lessons from CDC, Kafka, and Replay-Safe Inventory Platforms}},
  author    = {Shah, Ishan Deepak},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Raptors Conference},
  volume    = {1},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Hackathon Raptors},
  address   = {London, United Kingdom},
  doi       = {10.68495/rc.2026.C028},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.68495/rc.2026.C028},
  abstract  = {This paper examines what changes when CDC and Kafka streams become the operational truth for inventory state. It draws on a production inventory platform and an anonymized recovery of approximately one million events. Redis provided short-window duplicate suppression, while DynamoDB retained longer-lived processing evidence. The recovery pipeline and runbook described here were implemented and used in production. Their identifiers and labels are illustrative. The paper traces how ambiguous outcomes, offset resets, ordering mistakes, and stale projections can turn replay into another source of error. It separates message delivery from inventory mutation, then explains the controls needed to repair state: stable business-effect identity, bounded replay, audit records, and reconciliation against authoritative history. The practical test is whether a team can establish what happened, control the scope of replay, and prove the resulting business state is correct.}
}