Broker (Message‑Brokered)

Summary

Decouple producers and consumers via a broker that routes, buffers, and delivers messages (queues/topics).

What it is

A mediator style where components communicate indirectly through a broker. The broker handles routing (direct, fanout, topic), buffering, retries, and dead letters.

Benefits

• Temporal decoupling and backpressure handling
• Scalable consumers (competing consumers)
• Failure isolation via DLQs and retries

Trade-offs

• Operational complexity of the broker
• At-least-once semantics require idempotency
• Debugging multi-hop flows is harder

When to use

• Asynchronous work dispatch and integration
• Decoupling services with variable load
• Bridging unreliable or bursty producers