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Redis Streams for Apache Kafka Users

Paul Brebner gives us an overview of Redis Streams:

The Redis Streams data type is newer than the Redis Pub/Sub data type, and is designed to support “disconnected” distributed streaming applications. The data type itself is essentially an append-only data structure, stored in memory—basically preserved messages!

This differs from Redis Pub/Sub channels, which are focused only on the delivery of messages to currently connected subscribers only—Pub/Sub uses a push-based delivery mechanism, and if there are no current connected subscribers, then messages are simply discarded. And channels don’t remember messages to enable disconnected subscribers to catch up with missed messages, replay messages, or read different ranges of messages, etc. But channels are fast!

I’m still partial toward Kafka but Redis Streams are pretty nice.