As our system moved from a monolith towards microservices, services needed a way to communicate without depending on one another directly. We used ActiveMQ, managed through Amazon MQ, for that messaging. Later, we moved to Kafka on Amazon MSK.

This was not simply a change of hosting provider. ActiveMQ and Kafka have different messaging models, so the migration made us revisit how we publish, consume, and operate events. Here is why we made the move, what changed, and what I would keep in mind when planning a similar migration.

Why move from ActiveMQ to Kafka?

Amazon MQ gave us a managed ActiveMQ broker and a familiar message-broker model. That was a reasonable starting point: services could send messages through a broker instead of calling each other directly.

As we moved further towards event-driven microservices, Kafka became a better fit for the kind of communication we wanted to build around. Kafka stores records in durable, partitioned logs.…