Kafka Worker Pool in Go — Backpressure & Exactly-Once
Prerequisite: Part 5 of the System Design Masterclass. Read Part 4: Database Scaling to understand the storage tier that persisted events are written to. Answer-first: Event-Driven Architecture decouples services through asynchronous communication via a durable message log. In Go, goroutines and buffered channels implement natural backpressure — when consumers fall behind producers, the channel fills up and blocks the producer, throttling the ingest rate automatically. Kafka vs RabbitMQ — When to Use Each? Answer-first: Kafka is a distributed commit log — messages are retained indefinitely, consumers manage their own offsets, and replay is possible. RabbitMQ is a message broker — messages are deleted after acknowledgment, the broker handles routing complexity, push-based delivery. They solve different problems. ...