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In discussing the differences between Kafka and RabbitMQ, "dumb broker" and "smart broker" keeps popping up in their interactions with consumers. Kafka is described as having a dumb broker while RabbitMQ is said to have a smart broker/dumb consumer model.
What exactly does this mean? I'm familiar with the basics of Kafka and a little bit more about RabbitMQ. However, what features of RabbitMQ makes the broker smarter than Kafka's?
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Kafka offers much higher performance than message brokers like RabbitMQ. It uses sequential disk I/O to boost performance, making it a suitable option for implementing queues. It can achieve high throughput (millions of messages per second) with limited resources, a necessity for big data use cases.
RabbitMQ is lightweight and easy to deploy on premises and in the cloud. It supports multiple messaging protocols. RabbitMQ can be deployed in distributed and federated configurations to meet high-scale, high-availability requirements.
Kafka tends to work very well as a replacement for a more traditional message broker. In comparison to other messaging systems, Kafka has better throughput, built-in partitioning, replication and inherent fault-tolerance, which makes it a good fit for large-scale message processing applications.
RabbitMQ uses a push-based model with a smart producer, which means the producer decides when to push data. A prefetch limit is defined on the consumer to stop the producer from overwhelming consumers.
The point about Kafka using a dumb broker while Rabbit MQ using a smart broker is one of the points used while deciding which Messaging System to use. Since RabbitMQ is a smart broker implementing global startegies for retry is far easier and listener agnostic than in Kafka.
Given a set of microservices accessed through an API gateway I believe that the above point, combined with the advantages of Rabbit MQ being much more maintainable and the knowledge that the data passed across microservices will never amount to the same load as that of streaming data, makes Rabbit MQ a far better choice than Kafka for Inter Service Communication
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Dumb vs Smart broker means that the Broker can be smart to route messages based on certain conditions.
In the case of RabbitMQ, producer sends message to Exchange and Exchange routes the message to Queue. Here "Exchange" does the routing and thats what they call as Smart broker. Again people have made Brokers really smart and ended up with ESB which we all know what happened and Industry is moving away from Bloated ESB's.
In the case of Kafka, broker doesn't route messages. It is up to the user to create topics and consumer groups and decide which consumer groups listens to which topic.
Smart vs Dumb broker has nothing to do with Message acknowledgment. In case of RabbitMQ, it tracks the status of each message to see whether it is consumer or not. In the case of Kafka, it happens but differently by using offsets on partitions and offset is stored in Kafka itself ( consumer can also store). But both provide the functionality.
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