Architectural messaging patterns: an illustrated guide

At the conceptual level, a message is an exchange of information between a sender and one or many receivers. Message exchange has been an important part of computer programming and architectural design since the early days of mainframe computers.

Over the years, the practice of messaging has matured into a number of messaging patterns. In this article, I’m going to share some of the more commonly used approaches. I’ve divided the patterns into two sections. The first section, titled Message exchange architectures, describes the structures for moving messages between sender and receiver. The second section is Routing, which covers the logic used to deliver messages between sender and receiver.

• Message exchange architectures
  • Pub-Sub
  • Fanout
  • Unidirectional streaming
  • Bidirectional streaming
• Routing
  • Unicast
  • Broadcast
  • Multicast
  • Anycast

The following sections describe the various patterns in detail.

Message exchange architectures

This section describes the messaging patterns that are relevant to the mechanism for transmitting messages between a sender and receiver.

Pub-Sub

The Pub-Sub pattern is one in which a publisher sends a message to a topic on a message broker. You can think of a topic as an inbox. The concept of an inbox has different names according to the implementation technology. For example, RabbitMQ calls the inbox an Exchange while Kafka calls the inbox a Topic. A subscriber binds to the topic and receives messages from the topic in an asynchronous manner.

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The benefit of the Pub-Sub pattern is that it’s relatively straightforward: Message in, message out. Also, as mentioned above, the Pub-Sub pattern is asynchronous. Thus, there is no blocking lock between sender and receiver. The sender sends the message to the broker and then moves onto other tasks. The receiver accepts a message at its convenience. Messages in the Pub-Sub pattern tend to be discrete, containing all the information that a process needs to act upon the data provided.

Fanout

Fanout is similar to Pub-Sub in that an interested party binds to a topic, a.k.a. inbox. What differentiates the Fanout pattern from a typical Pub-Sub is that many interested parties will bind (a.k.a, subscribe) to a given topic. Then, when a message is sent to the topic, all subscribers will receive a copy of the message sent to the topic. The message is “fanned out.” (See Figure 2 below.)

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Twitter is a good example of the Fanout pattern. One single tweet is sent to all the parties following the person sending the tweet.

Unidirectional streaming

The Unidirectional streaming pattern is one in which a sender emits data continuously to a receiver. The sender might be a service that has direct knowledge of the receiver, such as a cell phone connected to a website on the internet and continuously sending GPS information about its location, as shown in Figure 3 below.

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Or, a sender might be connected to a broker technology that in turn forwards the stream via some sort of topic/inbox mechanism, as shown below in Figure 4. The receivers bound to an “inbox” on the broker receive a continuous flow of messages accordingly.

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Apache Kafka is an example of a message broker technology that implements Unidirectional streaming.

Bidirectional streaming

Bidirectional streaming is when a continuous flow of messages is sent between sender and receiver as well as between receiver and sender, as shown in Figure 5 below.

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An example of bidirectional streaming is gRPC. gRPC runs under HTTP/2, which allows a sender to establish a constant connection to a receiver. Once connected, data can flow back and forth between sender and receiver in a continuous stream.

Routing

This section lists the messaging patterns that describe the different ways to route messages between a sender and a receiver. Whereas Pub-Sub, Fanout, and Streaming patterns focus on the architecture of data transmission, the Unicast, Broadcast, Multicast, and Anycast patterns focus on routing.

Unicast

In the Unicast pattern, a message gets routed from a sender to a designated receiver. A well-known example of the unicast pattern is an HTTP request/response exchange.

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The sender, which in this case is a web browser, sends a request message to a webserver at a particular location on the network. The routing mechanisms of the internet know how to find the webserver and pass the request (a.k.a. message) accordingly. Then, the webserver sends a response message back to the caller using the same routing mechanism.

Broadcast

The Broadcast pattern is one in which a sender emits a message to all receivers on the network. The network router does the work of discovering devices on the network and forwarding the message accordingly.

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An example of the Broadcast pattern is the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP). Under ARP, the router knows the physical devices on the network and then correlates the device identifier, the MAC address, to the logical IP address, and then forwards the message accordingly.

Multicast

The Multicast pattern forwards a message from a sender on to a specific group of receivers. (See Figure 8 below.) Groups can be specified on the network by device type or by network segment, to name two examples.

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Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is a typical implementation of the Multicast pattern. For example, IPTV data will be streamed to devices connected to a particular “channel,” such as a live broadcast under Facebook or to a particular video conference session.

Anycast

In the Anycast pattern, the router sends a message to a receiver that meets the conditions set forth in a set of determining factors. The logic of the Anycast patterns is “send this message to any receiver that meets the following conditions.” Typically the Anycast pattern is used to route a message from sender to receiver based on proximity of geolocation, as shown in Figure 9 below.

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A content delivery network (CDN) is a technology that uses the Anycast pattern. A CDN is used to make it so that a sender receives data from the server closest to it on the internet.

Putting it all together

Most likely, if you’re an architect or developer that has been working with messaging in your application development activities, the patterns presented above are familiar to you. The names given to the patterns might be new information, but the actual implementations are recognizable.

The benefit of encapsulating a messaging pattern under a common name is that it allows architects and developers to talk about the same thing in the same way. Using a conventional name for a message pattern saves time. When in a design meeting, it’s a lot easier to say, “using the Pub-Sub pattern is a good way to meet the needs of this business requirement” than taking time to do a detail-laden explanation. Of course, the implicit assumption is that everybody in the meeting understands the details behind the patterns being referenced. Hopefully, the content and illustration provided in this piece can help by creating a common understanding of the more popular messaging patterns used in today’s enterprise architectures.