Message Broker

A practical example

Example: an e-commerce store publishes an 'order.placed' event to a broker; three independent consumers — the email platform, the data warehouse, and the loyalty service — each receive only the events they subscribe to.

What to evaluate before investing

• Confirm which protocols the broker speaks (AMQP, MQTT, HTTP) and whether they match your existing systems.
• Ask how routing rules are defined and changed, and whether changes require redeployment.
• Review delivery guarantees offered per routing pattern: at-least-once, at-most-once, or exactly-once semantics.

Limitations and tradeoffs

A broker adds operational overhead — monitoring, scaling, and failure handling — that a direct integration avoids; adopt one when you have multiple consumers or need decoupling, not by default.