The Outbox Blueprint — EF Core, RabbitMQ, and the Design Decisions Nobody Warns You About

Yesterday we understood why messages get lost. Today we build the system that catches them.

I thought the hard part was understanding why we needed the outbox pattern. The Two Generals Problem, the silent message loss, the database-and-broker split brain — that was conceptually uncomfortable, but at least it fit on a whiteboard.

The hard part was the thirty decisions we had to make when we actually sat down to build it.