Message brokers

Feature-wise, Kafka seemed great since consumers have a lot of flexibility. It turned out that Kafka had a latency of around 1 second in a local, idle setup. This is too high for us. Next we tested RabbitMQ, which delivers messages in-order (so no skipping to the most recent one) but performs much better in terms of latency (no noticeable delay whatsoever).

We decided to build a wrapper library supporting the basic operations we need so that we can swap out RabbitMQ if needed later on.

RabbitMQ specifics

The internal APIs correspond to RabbitMQ terminology in the following way:

Internal API concept	RabbitMQ equivalent
Topic	Exchange
Subscriber	Queue