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Big Data Messaging Systems: Point to Point vs. Publish-Subscribe
2 min readJan 13, 2022
Point to Point Messaging System
- Messages are persisted in a queue.
- One or more consumers can consume the messages in the queue, but a particular message can be consumed by a maximum of one consumer only.
- Once a consumer reads a message in the queue, it disappears from that queue. The typical example of this system is an Order Processing System, where each order will be processed by one Order Processor, but Multiple Order Processors can work as well at the same time.
Publish-Subscribe Messaging System
- Messages are persisted in a topic.
- Consumers can subscribe to one or more topic and consume all the messages in that topic
- Message producers are called publishers and message consumers are called subscribers.
- A real-life example is Dish TV, which publishes different channels like sports, movies, music, etc., and anyone can subscribe to their own set of channels and get them whenever their subscribed channels are available.
- Example: Apache Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system and a robust queue that can handle a high volume of data and enables you to pass messages from one end-point to another.
