Message Acknowledgement and Delivery Guarantees
Ensure messages are not silently lost by adding acknowledgements, retries, and idempotency to reach reliable delivery guarantees.
Messages Can Vanish
A message can be lost if the socket drops mid-send, the server crashes, or the client reloads before processing. Without acknowledgements, neither side knows it happened.
Delivery Guarantee Levels
Three common guarantees:
- At-most-once: may lose, never duplicate
- At-least-once: never lose, may duplicate
- Exactly-once: never lose, never duplicate (hardest)
All lessons in this course
- Handling Disconnections and Reconnects
- Robust Error Propagation and Recovery
- Heartbeats and Keep-Alives
- Message Acknowledgement and Delivery Guarantees