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After going through a couple of articles explaining the difference between Message Queues and Message Brokers, I'm quite confused as to whether Kafka is a Message Queue or a Message Broker.

The main difference that I know is that Message Queue offer two types of models:

  1. Point to Point Messaging
  2. Publisher-Subscriber Model

whereas Message Brokers offer only the Publisher-Subscriber model.

In the case of Kafka, my understanding is that it offers Publisher-Subscriber Model.

Hence, I'm quite confused. Can someone please help me here ??

Archit
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    Does it really matter? It's a distributed log with temporarily persistent queues hosted by servers called brokers – OneCricketeer Sep 22 '21 at 13:15
  • @OneCricketeer I'm clear about the working and stuff. Just got too much confused because these two terms are used interchangeably a lot. So you mean to say both these things mean the same ? – Archit Sep 22 '21 at 14:49
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    A Kafka server is a broker. A Kafka topic can be used as a first-in-first-out (FIFO) data-structure, which is a queue. Producers (or publishers, as you call them) enqueue, and consumers subscribe. However, like many "message queues", Kafka does not actually "remove" any elements coming out of it, so there is no proper "dequeue" action. Clients are still "point-to-point" with a server in-between – OneCricketeer Sep 22 '21 at 15:52

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