Jack Vanlightly

Event-Driven Architectures

Event-Driven Architectures - Queue vs Log - A Case Study

In the previous post we looked at relative event ordering and the decoupling of publishers and consumers among other things. In this post we'll take those concepts and look at an example architecture. We'll look at the various modelling possibilities we have with RabbitMQ representing a queue based system, and Kafka representing a log based system.

Event-Driven Architectures - The Queue vs The Log

A messaging system is at the heart of most event-driven architectures and there are a plethora of different technologies in the space and they can be classified as either queue based or log based.

Queue based: RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, MSMQ, AWS SQS, JMQ and many more.

Log based: Apache Kakfa, Apache Pulsar, AWS Kinesis, Azure Event Hubs and many more.

Each messaging system has different features but at the heart are their data structures: queue or log. In this post we'll take a look at how the underlying data structure affects your event-driven architecture.