Message Queue
A message queue decouples producers from consumers asynchronously: producers send messages to the queue, consumers process them in order, absorbing traffic spikes.
Purpose
Decouple components asynchronously, absorbing spikes and improving resilience.
Mechanism
Producers send messages without waiting for processing. Consumers pull and process in order. Point-to-point (SQS/RabbitMQ) vs pub-sub (Kafka/SNS). Persistence guarantees no message loss. Ordering/partitioning/retry policies.
Use cases
- Asynchronous communication
- Peak shaving
- Decoupling
Related terms
Dead Letter Queue
A dead letter queue stores messages that cannot be processed, keeping poison messages from blocking normal handling and allowing later analysis and reprocessing. GLOSSARY
Actor Model
The Actor model encapsulates computation into independent actors that communicate via asynchronous messages with no shared memory, concurrency-safe by nature. GLOSSARY