What Are These Things?
You may also enjoy: Change Data Capture (CDC) With Embedded Debezium and Spring BootI have written about events on this blog before and have described them as announcements of something that has happened in the system domain, with relevant data about that occurrence. At a glance, this might seem to be the same as CDC — something changes in a system and this needs to be communicated to other systems — which is exactly what CDC is about.
However, there is a key distinction to be made here. Events are defined at a far higher level of abstraction than data changes because they are meaningful changes to the domain. Data representing an entity can change without it having any "business" impact on the overall entity that the data represents. There can be several sub-states of an order that an order management system might maintain internally but which do not matter to the outside world.
An order moving to these states would not generate events but changes would be logged in the CDC system. On the other hand, there are be states that the rest of the world cares about (created, dispatched etc) and the order management system explicitly exposes to the outside world. Changes to or from these states would generate events.