Message queues
Why systems pass work through queues: decoupling, absorbing bursts and doing slow work later. Producers, consumers and brokers, point-to-point vs publish-subscribe, delivery guarantees, acknowledgements and retries, dead-letter queues, ordering, and choosing a broker.
CodexBash, , 5 min read
When a user signs up, your application might need to save the account, send a welcome email, create a billing record and notify analytics. Doing all of that before responding makes sign-up slow, and if the email service is down, sign-up fails. A message queue lets the application record "a user signed up" and move on, while other parts of the system do their work in their own time. It is one of the most useful tools in system design.
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