An Introduction to Message Queue
Just the other day, a friend of mine asked me to explain Google Pubsub to him. Being a good friend, I explained it to him in a few sentences and he seemed to get it at the time. However, a while later after he tried it for himself, he asked me a few follow up questions of which I couldn't answer in a few sentences like before. So we started a voice call and I went on to launch a rather lengthy explanation complete with analogies and the like. He still sounds somewhat unconvinced. Maybe I lost him somewhere along the way with my crappy analogies? Anyway, this back-and-forth made it dawn on me that the concept of message queue may not come naturally even to seasoned engineer like my friend. I myself understood Google Pubsub relatively quickly because I have prior encounter with Kafka after all. Therefore it is very reasonable for people - including experienced engineer - to not grasp the concept on first try. So here I am. Writing an article so I can just point people here in case I ...