Show HN: KanthorQ – Messaging System Backed by PostgreSQL

Show HN: KanthorQ – Messaging System Backed by PostgreSQL(github.com)

4 points by buglungtung 1 year ago | 1 comment

It's my pleasure to share my open-source project with the HN community:

KanthorQ - Messaging System Backed by PostgreSQL

Repo: https://github.com/kanthorlabs/kanthorq Docs: https://docs.kanthorlabs.com/kanthorq/

I designed, developed, and maintained it to address most of my use cases. Here are some key features:

- Transactional enqueuement: Helps avoid situations where you successfully enqueue a message, but your compute is lost, or the opposite scenario occurs.

- Message persistence: Messages are stored in the database indefinitely until explicitly deleted. This makes tracing, monitoring, and debugging much easier.

- Categorization by subjects: Simplifies message filtering and organization by subject.

If you're familiar with NATS.io, you'll find it easy to get started with KanthorQ. I was an avid user of NATS.io, and it inspired me greatly while designing KanthorQ.

Some example usecases

- Webhook gateway

- Batch jobs

- Notifications

buglungtung 1 year ago |

The funny story behind KanthorQ is that it stemmed from a challenge I faced with another project: an open-source webhook gateway (https://github.com/kanthorlabs/kanthor). After completing that project and starting some benchmarks, I realized I was dealing with issues I had never encountered before.

When something went wrong, I had to scan through a list of events to identify the failed ones. However, doing that with traditional message brokers like NATS.io or RabbitMQ was challenging. I needed an additional layer to store the events and analyze the data. As a result, a simple system required two high-availability components to function properly.

Additionally, backup and restoration were not straightforward with traditional message brokers like NATS.io or RabbitMQ. It's difficult to back up and restore these systems—or at least, I couldn't find a reliable way to do it.

That's why I developed KanthorQ. Now, I have a message broker where data is stored in a database, making it easy to browse, analyze, back up, and restore.