Glossary

A

Acknowledgment (ACK) : A signal sent by a message consumer to indicate that a message has been successfully processed.

Apache Kafka : A distributed streaming platform designed for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications.

Apache Pulsar : A multi-tenant, high-performance solution for server-to-server messaging with features like multi-tenancy, geo-replication, and tiered storage.

Asynchronous Messaging : A communication pattern where the sender doesn't wait for a response from the receiver before continuing.

At-least-once Delivery : A message delivery guarantee where messages are delivered one or more times, but duplicates are possible.

At-most-once Delivery : A message delivery guarantee where messages are delivered at most once, but message loss is possible.

B

Broker : A server that acts as an intermediary for message routing between producers and consumers.

Backpressure : A mechanism to handle situations where message consumers cannot keep up with the rate of incoming messages.

C

Consumer : An application or component that receives and processes messages from a messaging system.

Consumer Group : A group of consumers that work together to process messages from a topic or queue, typically for load balancing.

Connection Pooling : A technique to reuse connections to reduce the overhead of establishing new connections for each message.

D

Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) : A queue where messages that cannot be processed successfully are sent for later analysis or manual intervention.

Durable Subscription : A subscription that persists even when the subscriber is offline, ensuring message delivery when it reconnects.

E

Event Sourcing : A pattern where state changes are stored as a sequence of events, allowing the system to reconstruct state from these events.

Exactly-once Delivery : A message delivery guarantee where each message is delivered exactly once, with no duplicates or losses.

Exchange : In RabbitMQ, a component that receives messages from producers and routes them to queues based on routing rules.

F

Fanout : A messaging pattern where a single message is delivered to multiple consumers.

FIFO (First In, First Out) : A queue processing order where messages are processed in the order they were received.

H

High Availability (HA) : The ability of a system to remain operational even when some components fail.

Horizontal Scaling : Adding more servers or instances to handle increased load.

I

Idempotency : The property that allows an operation to be performed multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.

In-memory Messaging : Messaging systems that store messages in memory for high-speed processing, typically sacrificing durability.

J

JMS (Java Message Service) : A Java API that allows applications to create, send, receive, and read messages in enterprise messaging systems.

K

Kafka Connector : A component that connects Kafka to external systems for data import/export.

Kafka Streams : A client library for building applications that process and analyze data stored in Kafka.

L

Load Balancing : Distributing incoming messages across multiple consumers to improve performance and reliability.

Log Compaction : A feature in Kafka that ensures only the latest value for each key is retained in a topic.

M

Message : A unit of data transmitted between applications or components in a messaging system.

Message Broker : A software component that facilitates communication between different applications by translating messages between protocols.

Message Queue : A form of asynchronous service-to-service communication used in serverless and microservices architectures.

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) : A lightweight messaging protocol designed for IoT devices and low-bandwidth, high-latency networks.

N

NATS : A high-performance messaging system designed for cloud-native applications, IoT messaging, and microservices.

O

Offset : A unique identifier for a message within a partition, used to track message consumption progress.

Ordering : The guarantee that messages are processed in a specific sequence.

P

Partition : A way to divide a topic into multiple segments to enable parallel processing and scalability.

Persistent Message : A message that is stored on disk and survives broker restarts.

Producer : An application or component that sends messages to a messaging system.

Publish-Subscribe (Pub/Sub) : A messaging pattern where producers (publishers) send messages to topics, and consumers (subscribers) receive messages from topics they're interested in.

Q

Queue : A data structure that stores messages in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) manner.

Quorum : The minimum number of nodes required to be available for the system to function properly.

R

RabbitMQ : An open-source message broker that implements the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP).

Replication : The process of copying data across multiple nodes to ensure fault tolerance and high availability.

Routing Key : A message attribute used by the message broker to determine which queue(s) should receive the message.

S

Saga Pattern : A design pattern for managing distributed transactions across multiple services.

Scaling : The ability to handle increased load by adding resources (vertical scaling) or more instances (horizontal scaling).

Serialization : The process of converting data structures into a format suitable for transmission over a network.

Service Bus : An enterprise messaging infrastructure that provides reliable message delivery between distributed applications.

Solace : A messaging platform that provides event-driven communication for enterprise applications.

Stream Processing : The processing of data in motion, analyzing and acting on data as it flows through the system.

T

Topic : A category or feed name to which messages are published in a pub/sub messaging system.

Throughput : The number of messages that can be processed per unit of time.

Transactional Messaging : A messaging pattern that ensures messages are processed as part of a transaction, maintaining ACID properties.

V

Vertical Scaling : Adding more power (CPU, RAM) to existing servers to handle increased load.

W

WebSocket : A communication protocol that provides full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection.

WAN (Wide Area Network) : A network that spans large geographical areas, often requiring specialized messaging considerations.

Z

ZeroMQ : A high-performance asynchronous messaging library that provides message queuing without a message broker.

Zookeeper : A coordination service used by distributed systems, notably used by Apache Kafka for cluster management.