Messaging and Streaming

The requirements of our e-commerce application include both traditional messaging as well as streaming use cases.  Let’s learn a little more about messaging and streaming, and how they are both supported by Apache Pulsar.

Message queueing:

• Ideal for work queues that do not require tasks to be performed in a particular order
• Message retention after processing typically not important

Data streaming:

• Works best in situations where the order of messages is important
• Messages often retained and can be processed again

Apache Pulsar supports both message queueing and data streaming through subscriptions.  In this course, we will investigate all of the available subscription types and when to use them for message queueing and data streaming.

Key concepts discussed throughout the course:

• Messages: belong to a topic and contain an arbitrary payload
• Producer: process that publishes a message to a topic
• Consumer: process that establishes a subscription to a topic and processes messages from that topic
• Topic: named channel for transmitting messages from producers to consumers
• Broker: handles connections and routes messages
• Subscription: specifies how messages are delivered to a group of one or more consumers