Concepts

Organization

Organizations provide a central place to group your projects and collaborate with team members. In FlowMQ, all projects live within organizations. When you sign up, you automatically get a free organization for your first project.

Project

A Project is a decicated and isolated FlowMQ instance. It provides all FlowMQ features like multiple messaging protocol support, stream storage, security, etc... It should be your main workspace.

Message

An Message (also known as a record) is the unit of data that flows through the system. It consists of a payload (the actual data you send) and optional metadata or attributes.

Topic

A Topic is a named "address" for a message. FlowMQ's topics are protocol-agnostic and are known as Unified Topics.

Producer / Publisher

A Producer (or Publisher) is a client application that creates and sends messages to a specific topic in FlowMQ.

Consumer / Subscriber

A Consumer (or Subscriber) is a client application that attaches to a subscription, a stream or a queue to receive and process messages.

Subscription

A Subscription delivers a copy of every message from a Topic to its attached consumers. This is a classic publish/subscribe (pub/sub) fan-out pattern.

Stream

A Stream is a durable, ordered, immutable, and replayable log of messages. Consumers can read a stream from any point in time, rewind to re-process old messages, or read in real-time. This is analogous to a Kafka topic, and a stream in FlowMQ can be accessed by Kafka clients. See Streaming to learn more.

Queue

A Queue provides point-to-point, load-balanced message delivery. When multiple consumers listen to the same queue, FlowMQ ensures each message is delivered to only one of them, effectively distributing the workload.

A Queue in FlowMQ can be consumed by AMQP clients.

Topic Filter

A Topic Filter allows consumers to subscribe to multiple topics using wildcards (e.g., devices/+/temperature or alerts/#). This is a powerful feature common in protocols like MQTT that enables a single consumer to receive messages from a dynamic range of topics.