by Example

A pull consumer allows for the application to fetch one or more messages on-demand using a subscription bound to the consumer. This allows the application to control the flow of the messages coming in so it can process and ack them in an appropriate amount of time.

A consumer can either be durable or ephemeral. A durable consumer will have its state tracked on the server, most importantly, the last acknowledged message from the client.

Ephemeral consumers are useful as one-off needs and are a bit cheaper in terms of resources and management. However, ephemerals do not (of course) persist after the primary subscriber unsubscribes. The server will automatically clean up (delete) the consumer after a period of time.

Since each subscription is fetching messages on-demand, multiple subscriptions can be create bound to the same pull consumer without any additional configuration. Each subscriber can fetch batches of messages and process them concurrently.

It is important to note that the messages in a given batch are ordered with respect to each other, but each subscriber will be handling a batch independently. If there is a need to have determinstic partitioning for scalable order processing, learn more here.