Question 1

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

Accepted Answer

Message queues are usually for point-to-point work distribution: a message is processed and then removed. Event streaming is for continuous event data where many consumers may read the same events, often with ordering per partition and the ability to replay events for a period of time (useful for analytics, auditing, and rebuilding state).

Question 2

When should I use event streaming?

Accepted Answer

Use it when you need near-real-time reactions to data (seconds or less), multiple downstream consumers (analytics, alerts, personalization), or the ability to replay events. Common cases include clickstream analytics, fraud detection, IoT telemetry, real-time dashboards, and microservice event-driven architectures.

Question 3

How much does event streaming cost?

Accepted Answer

Costs typically depend on throughput (ingress/egress), retention duration, number of partitions/shards, and any processing you add (stream processing, connectors, storage). Managed services often charge for capacity (e.g., shards/partitions or throughput units), data volume, and retention; networking and cross-region replication can add significant cost.

Event Streaming

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