Let's start by taking the simplest of all possible scenarios. We have a single producer, which sends one or more messages (each message is one red block) to a single consumer, such as in the following:
Our next step up the difficulty ladder would be to have a single producer publish one or more messages to multiple consumers, such as in the following diagram. This is distributing tasks (work) among different workers, also sometimes referred to as the competing consumers pattern. This means that each consumer will take one or more messages. Depending upon how the message queues are set up, the consumers may each receive ...
