Distributed Systems: an introduction to Publish-Subscribe (pub/sub)

More and more of the web is moving to microservice architecture, which allows for loosely-coupled services to work together to provide functionality to users. While these services will often communicate with each other via network requests, the publish-subscribe model is another common way for this collaboration to occur.

There are many different technologies that can be used to implement pub-sub, including but not limited to Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub, and Microsoft Event Hubs. The purpose of this…