05-messaging-async-workflows

Messaging & Async Workflows

Kafka fundamentals, event processing, retries, and reliability patterns for backend workflows.

backend-engineerkafkamessagingasyncreliability

Messaging & Async Workflows

Use event streaming and asynchronous processing to decouple services and handle unreliable workflows.

Key concepts

  • Kafka producers, consumers, partitions, and offsets.
  • Consumer groups and rebalancing.
  • Retry strategies and dead-letter queues.
  • Idempotent consumers and at-least-once delivery.

Engineering focus

Build event-driven flows that tolerate failure, avoid duplicate processing, and preserve ordering where required.


Interview Questions

  1. What is the role of partitions in Kafka?
  2. How does a Kafka consumer group work?
  3. When should you use a dead-letter queue?
  4. Why is idempotency important in event processing?