This presentation was recorded at Voxxed Days Belgrade 2016 - https://belgrade.voxxeddays.com/ To most developers messaging systems are disregarded as 'just a pipe'. Without understanding the reasoning behind them and the underlying design decision, we are frustrated by how we think they should work in production. In this session we will compare and contrast Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka, and how their designs address message distribution, reliability, scalability, and performance.