Everything You Need to Know About Message Queues: A Complete Guide

Message queues are one of the critical components in any software architecture which helps different components talk to each other asynchronously. In this article let’s discuss what message queues are, how they’re used in modern architecture, and what problems do they solve.

Let’s say you want to withdraw some money from an ATM. An ATM machine can only allow one person to do transactions at a time. In this case, what do you do when you see there’s a person already using the ATM machine? Do you wait in a queue or do you go back thinking you cannot withdraw money from this machine?

Exactly! You wait in a queue until your turn comes.

So when many people want to withdraw money they will have to wait in a queue and go to the ATM machine in the same order in which they entered the queue. This is one real world example of queues and message queues serve the same purpose in any software architecture.

We will talk about below topics in this article:

• What are message queues?
• How are message queues used in a system?
• What problems do message queues solve?
• Other properties of message queues
• Resources