AI builder who teaches what he ships — new production AI lessons
    Jasmin.
    All Architectures
    Real-TimeIntermediate

    Redis Streams Event Bus

    An event bus that does not start with Kafka. Redis Streams + consumer groups give you ordered events, retries, and lag metrics. PostgreSQL keeps the outbox so a crash cannot drop a “order paid” event. Graduate to Kafka when retention and fan-out demand it.

    1K – 200Kusers supported
    $90 – $900/month infrastructure

    Architecture Diagram

    Interactive — hover over any node to see its role and description.

    ProducerOrder APIPostgresOutboxOutbox RelayRedis StreamXADD / XREADEmail WorkerIndexerAnalyticsDLQDead letterAPIDatabaseQueueCacheBackend

    Use Cases

    Order → email → analytics without coupling services
    CRM activity fan-out to webhooks and search indexers
    AI pipelines that need at-least-once tool-result events
    Multiplayer or live dashboards with small teams
    Replacing noisy cron with event-driven workers

    Technology Stack

    backend

    Node.jsBullMQ optionalPython consumers

    database

    Redis StreamsPostgreSQL outbox

    infrastructure

    ElastiCacheECSDocker

    Scalability Roadmap

    Stage 1Low volume users· One Redis + one consumer

    Single stream. Fine for thousands of events/minute.

    Stage 2Many consumers users· Consumer groups

    Independent groups per domain. MAXLEN approximate trim.

    Stage 3Higher retention users· Sharded streams

    Partition by tenant or aggregate ID. Outbox still in Postgres.

    Stage 4Enterprise bus users· Kafka / Kinesis

    Move the backbone when you need weeks of retention and huge fan-out. Keep Redis for hot paths.

    Cost Breakdown

    Development Cost

    $7,000 – $18,000 (4–9 weeks)

    Infrastructure Cost

    $90 – $900/month

    Maintenance Cost

    $800 – $2,000/month for lag alerts and poison-message ops

    Security Considerations

    Events carry IDs not payloads of secrets
    Consumers authenticate to Redis on a private network
    PII fields encrypted or omitted from the stream

    More Architectures

    Real-Time

    Real-Time Chat App

    WebSocket-based messaging with channels, presence, and media sharing

    Real-Time

    Notification Platform

    Push, email, SMS, and in-app — queued on Redis, logged in Postgres

    AI Systems

    AI Agent Platform

    Autonomous AI agents with memory, tools & multi-step reasoning

    Need This Architecture Built?

    Get a detailed architecture plan, technology recommendations, development roadmap, and infrastructure estimation for your project.