What Is Message Broker?

Message brokers are a lot like the mediators of the messaging world. They're the go-betweens that help you get your message across. For example, imagine you want to send a text message to someone in another country. The problem is that your phone doesn't know how to say "hello" in their language. So instead of just sending it, it relies on a message broker (the middleman we mentioned) who translates your message into their language and sends it to you. The message gets back an answer, and voila! You've got yourself a conversation! It is a service that enables the exchange of data between applications and systems made by different vendors. When these systems cannot talk to one another directly, they can use a message broker to facilitate communication. It is essential because different systems often have different software protocols. A message broker allows systems to communicate with each other, despite their different software protocols. Publishing is when one system sends a message to another via the message broker. When the other system receives that message, it is called subscribing. All message brokers have some form of message protocol. It is how the message broker receives and sends notifications to other systems. Numerous message brokers are available, but a few stand out from the rest. One of the most popular message brokers is Apache Kafka. So what do you do when you want to send a message? You could go ahead and send it, but that's risky. What if your message gets lost in translation? That's where the message broker comes in. A message broker is a program that acts as an intermediary interface between two different messaging protocols, translating your message from one system to another so that the other party can receive it.