Question 1

What's the difference between event streaming and message queues?

Accepted Answer

Message queues are usually designed for task distribution: a message is processed once and then removed, often with a single consumer per message. Event streaming is designed for continuous flows of events where multiple consumers can read the same event stream independently, often keeping events for a retention period so consumers can replay and reprocess data.

Question 2

When should I use event streaming?

Accepted Answer

Use event streaming when you need real-time or near-real-time reactions to data (fraud detection, monitoring, personalization), when multiple systems need the same events (analytics + alerts + data lake ingestion), or when you want to decouple producers from consumers so teams can add new consumers without changing the producer.

Question 3

How much does event streaming cost?

Accepted Answer

Costs typically depend on throughput (events/second or MB/s), number of partitions/shards, retention duration, and data egress. Managed services may also charge for ingress/egress, storage for retained events, and features like dedicated capacity, schema registry, or connectors. Stream processing (e.g., Flink/Spark/Dataflow) is usually priced separately from the streaming transport.

Event Streaming

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