Lightweight messaging for microservices
kunefe is a low-latency, gRPC-based message broker built to move messages between your services without the operational overhead. Small footprint, fast by default.
Everything a broker should be. Nothing it shouldn't.
kunefe focuses on doing one job well: getting messages between your services quickly and predictably.
gRPC-native
Built directly on gRPC and protobuf, so your services talk to kunefe the same way they already talk to each other.
Low latency
A lean core with sub-millisecond routing overhead, tuned for high-throughput, latency-sensitive workloads.
Lightweight footprint
A single small binary with no heavyweight dependencies. Runs comfortably on a shared node or a sidecar container.
Pub/Sub & queues
Fan out events to many subscribers or balance work across consumers, all through the same broker.
Horizontally scalable
Add brokers as traffic grows. kunefe is designed to scale out instead of forcing you to scale up.
Simple to self-host
No external coordination service required to get started. Ship a config file and you're moving messages.
A few lines is all it takes
Drop in the Spring Boot starter and autowire a client, or generate one from the kunefe proto definitions. Publish, subscribe, and acknowledge messages with a minimal, predictable API.
- Spring Boot starter with auto-configuration
- Strongly-typed messages via protobuf
- At-least-once delivery with manual ack
@Autowired
private KunefeClient client;
client.publish(Message.builder()
.topic("orders.created")
.payload(payload)
.build());How it works
A straightforward path from producer to consumer, with no extra moving parts to operate.
Producers publish
Services publish messages to a topic over gRPC using a generated client — no extra protocol to maintain.
kunefe routes
The broker matches topics to subscribers and queues, keeping delivery ordered and predictable per partition.
Consumers subscribe
Consumers stream messages as they arrive and acknowledge processing, with automatic redelivery on failure.
Scale horizontally
Add more broker nodes as load grows. Clients discover the cluster without any config changes.
Ready to simplify service-to-service messaging?
Add the Spring Boot starter, point it at your broker, and start publishing. Self-hosted, open source, and built for speed.
implementation("dev.kunefe:kunefe-spring-boot-starter:0.1.0")Star on GitHub