Concepts

MQTT

MQTT is a somewhat simple protocol: it follows a publish/subscriber paradigm and messages are exchanged using topics. These topics are simple strings such as /admin/cafe/attrs. A publisher can, well, publish messages by sending them to a MQTT broker using a particular topic and all the subscribers that are listening to that topic will receive a copy of the message.

Subscribers can listen not only to specific topics, but also to topics with wildcards. For instance, one could use a ‘+’ to indicate that any token will match the subscribed topic, such as /admin/+/attrs - messages sent to both /admin/cafe/attrs and /admin/4593/attrs, for instance, will be received by this subscriber. Another possibility is to create a subscription to all remainder tokens in the topic, such as /admin/#. All messages sent to topics beginning with /admin/ will be received by this subscriber.

Kafka

Kafka is, in fact, a project from the Apache Foundation. It is a messaging system that is similar to MQTT in the sense that both are based on publisher/subscriber. Kafka is way more complex and robust - it deals with multiple subscribers belonging to the same group (and performs load-balancing between them), stores and replays messages, and so on. The side effect is that its clients are not that simple, which could be a heavy burden for tiny devices.