Core Patterns • July 14, 2025 • 4 min read
Outbox vs CDC — Picking the Right Tool
Transactional outbox and Change Data Capture solve the same problem differently. The practical trade-offs, and how to decide between them for your system.
Tag
#kafka
Core Patterns • December 11, 2023 • 5 min read
Dead Letter Queues — Handling the Unhandleable
What DLQs are, why you must have one for every message consumer, and the operational patterns that keep bad messages from blocking the good ones.
Highload • July 18, 2023 • 4 min read
Kafka Schema Registry — The Missing Guardrail
Why you need a schema registry the moment you have more than one consumer, how Avro and Protobuf compare, and the compatibility rules that prevent production accidents.
Core Patterns • June 21, 2023 • 5 min read
Transactional Outbox — The Pattern, End to End
Why "save to DB, then publish to Kafka" is almost always wrong, and the outbox pattern that fixes it — with real Java code, schema, and production considerations.
Basics • February 17, 2023 • 4 min read
Message Brokers — An Introduction
What message brokers are, why distributed systems need them, and how to choose between Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, and friends for your use case.
Highload • January 24, 2023 • 4 min read
Kafka Streams — When It's Right and When It's Overkill
A pragmatic intro to Kafka Streams — what it is, what it gives you over plain consumers, and the honest operational cost.