Messaging Topic

Messaging

Once two services need to agree on something, you need messaging. These posts cover Kafka, why the database is not a queue, the transactional outbox pattern, and the failure modes specific to async communication between services.

Backend

Posted on Apr 8, 2026

The Outbox Pattern: Reliable Events Without Two-Phase Commit

Reliable event publishing alongside database writes is harder than it looks. The transactional outbox pattern solves it without distributed transactions.

The Database Is Not Your Message Queue

Polling a status column every few seconds works until it does not. Here is why your database makes a terrible message queue and what to reach for instead.

The Transactional Outbox Pattern in Spring Boot

Build the transactional outbox pattern in Spring Boot with Kafka: atomic writes, a polling relay, and full integration tests with Testcontainers, all working.