Communication Through Asynchronous Messages

We have seen how different systems in a distributed system can communicate with one another. So far, two methods are evident. The first one is to having a storage system in the middle where one service writes the data, and the other service reads it. And in the second one is having one service is doing a network call directly to the other service. Next, we want to discuss this last approach—data movement through asynchronous messaging.

What is asynchronous messaging?

In asynchronous messaging, messages are not directly sent from one service to another . This is done via another component in the middle which receives messages from the sender service, enqueues them, and finally dispatches the messages to the receiver service. The component in the middle is called the message broker or message queue. The sender is generally denoted as the producer, whereas the receiver is the consumer.

The term ‘message’ is loosely used here. It can be any form of data including request objects to the data blob.