Design a Distributed Message Queue
Last Updated: December 29, 2025
What is a Distributed Message Queue?
A distributed message queue is a system that enables asynchronous communication between services by storing and forwarding messages from producers to consumers across multiple servers.
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The core idea is to decouple producers (who send messages) from consumers (who process them), allowing both sides to operate independently and at different speeds. Messages are persisted in the queue until they are consumed, providing reliability and fault tolerance.
Popular Examples: Apache Kafka, Amazon SQS, RabbitMQ, Apache Pulsar, Google Pub/Sub
This problem touches on many distributed systems fundamentals: partitioning for scale, replication for fault tolerance, ordering guarantees, and the subtle differences between delivery semantics.
In this article, we will explore the high-level design of a distributed message queue.
Let's start by clarifying the requirements.