jargon

Backend & systems·Queues, streams and delivery semantics

consumers read from a retained, ordered log at their own position, so a new consumer can start from the beginning of history.

Event stream

Also calledlog-based messaging, Kafka topic, commit log

A durable, ordered, replayable log partitioned for parallelism, as opposed to a queue that deletes on acknowledgement. Retention means you can add a consumer, reprocess after a bug, or rebuild a projection. Ordering is only guaranteed within a partition, so the partition key decides what "in order" means for your data.

Commonly confused with