Overview

Problem Statement

Message queues are a crucial component of modern software infrastructure. Developers interact with message queue providers daily throughout the development lifecycle—whether for debugging, testing, or sampling messages. However, the built-in tools provided by most message queue platforms are often insufficient for the operational needs of software engineers. For example, publishing and sampling messages are common tasks during development, but these are not always well-supported.

On the other hand, granting developers full access to message queue tools can introduce security risks. While sampling messages may be acceptable, actions like dumping messages to a local drive or deleting topics in production can be dangerous if not properly controlled. Therefore, production clusters must be secured. Unfortunately, the security features built into most message queue platforms are minimal or even non-existent. Infrastructure managers are often forced to choose between giving developers full access or none at all to tools like NSQAdmin or Kafka-UI.

Why Topic Master?

To address these challenges, Topic Master aims to provide developers with a reliable tool for daily message queue operations. Topic Master is developer-centric, focusing exclusively on features that assist with development tasks (such as publishing and tailing messages), rather than infrastructure management (like monitoring or alerting), as there are already excellent tools available for observability.

The security model is designed to be both efficient and simple. Administration responsibilities are distributed to each team, so the main administrator (root) is not burdened with every access approval. This approach ensures that security is maintained without sacrificing developer productivity.