Lesson 17 / 32

Queues vs Pub/Sub

Point-to-point work distribution vs broadcast to many subscribers.

Point-to-point vs broadcast

A queue delivers each message to exactly one consumer in a pool — great for distributing work. Pub/Sub delivers each message to every subscriber of a topic — great for fanning an event out to many independent listeners.

Kafka vs RabbitMQ at a glance

RabbitMQ is a traditional broker: smart routing, per-message acknowledgment, messages removed once consumed. Kafka is a distributed log: messages are retained for a configured time, consumers track their own offset and can replay history — better for huge throughput and multiple independent consumer groups reading the same stream.

Pick by replay need

If you need to reprocess history (rebuild a cache, backfill analytics), reach for Kafka's log model. If you need flexible routing and simple task queues, RabbitMQ is often less operational overhead.