Message Queues & Event-Driven Architecture

The specific mechanics System Design's queue lesson only introduced — Kafka partitions and consumer groups, RabbitMQ exchanges and routing, ordering guarantees, the transactional outbox pattern, schema evolution, and the pitfalls that turn 'event-driven' into a distributed monolith nobody can debug.

12 lessons

Study 24 cards for this domain

Beginner

Point-to-point vs. pub/sub: queues vs. topicsBeginner3 min read·Not started

Intermediate

Kafka fundamentals: topics, partitions, and consumer groupsIntermediate3 min read·Not started RabbitMQ fundamentals: exchanges, bindings, and routingIntermediate3 min read·Not started Message ordering guarantees — and when order doesn't actually matterIntermediate3 min read·Not started Event-driven patterns: notification, state transfer, and event sourcingIntermediate3 min read·Not started Competing consumers, backpressure, and consumer lagIntermediate3 min read·Not started Poison messages and retry strategiesIntermediate3 min read·Not started Choosing between Kafka, RabbitMQ, and SQS/SNSIntermediate3 min read·Not started

Advanced

CQRS: separating the model that writes from the model that readsAdvanced3 min read·Not started The transactional outbox pattern: solving the dual-write problemAdvanced3 min read·Not started Schema evolution: changing an event's shape without breaking every consumerAdvanced3 min read·Not started Event-driven pitfalls, and the distributed monolithAdvanced3 min read·Not started