Next-Generation Event-Driven Architectures: Performance, Scalability, and Intelligent Orchestration Across Messaging Frameworks

Modern distributed systems demand low-latency, fault-tolerant event processing that exceeds traditional messaging architecture limits. While frameworks including Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Apache Pulsar, NATS JetStream, and serverless event buses have matured significantly, no unified comparative study evaluates them holistically under standardized conditions. This paper presents the first comprehensive benchmarking framework evaluating 12 messaging systems across three representative workloads: e-commerce transactions, IoT telemetry ingestion, and AI inference pipelines. We introduce AIEO (AI-Enhanced Event Orchestration), employing machine learning-driven predictive scaling, reinforcement learning for dynamic resource allocation, and multi-objective optimization. Our evaluation reveals fundamental trade-offs: Apache Kafka achieves peak throughput (1.2M messages/sec, 18ms p95 latency) but requires substantial operational expertise; Apache Pulsar provides balanced performance (950K messages/sec, 22ms p95) with superior multi-tenancy; serverless solutions offer elastic scaling for variable workloads despite higher baseline latency (80-120ms p95). AIEO demonstrates 34\% average latency reduction, 28\% resource utilization improvement, and 42% cost optimization across all platforms. We contribute standardized benchmarking methodologies, open-source intelligent orchestration, and evidence-based decision guidelines. The evaluation encompasses 2,400+ experimental configurations with rigorous statistical analysis, providing comprehensive performance characterization and establishing foundations for next-generation distributed system design.