Interview knowledge

Kafka vs SQS

Growingest.Started 11 Sept 20261 min read#engineering#system-design

Kafka SQSin the trade-off explorer →

Where it sits: Message queue

Kafka wins when:

  • You need persistence
  • Strict ordering at scale
  • Stream processing
    SQS+SNS wins when:
  • You're ok with the AWS structure and minimal operations
  • Retry + DLQ built-in
  • Ordering does not matter as much, high throughput does
  • Costs are fine as you pay per ack

Referenced by

  • Event Driven SystemGrowing

    Dealing with important events that needs to be stored forever (ie refund events) When you need replayability of events (reprocess historical data) Real-time data processing.