Glossary
Message Queue
A message queue is a temporary storage buffer that holds messages from a producer until a consumer is ready to process them. It decouples the sender from the receiver, enabling reliable asynchronous communication across distributed systems.
General definition
A message queue sits between the component that generates a message (the producer) and the component that processes it (the consumer). Rather than requiring both sides to be available at the same instant, the queue persists the message until the consumer acknowledges it. This pattern is fundamental to building resilient, decoupled architectures.
- At-least-once or exactly-once delivery guarantees depending on configuration
- Backpressure handling when consumers are slower than producers
- Dead-letter queues for messages that cannot be processed
- Priority ordering so high-importance messages are processed first
Common queue implementations include RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, and Apache Kafka. Queues are used alongside a message broker, which routes messages to the correct queue. Protocols such as AMQP and MQTT define the wire format and semantics for queue interactions.
In the Ethora ecosystem
In an Ethora deployment, message queues handle backend event pipelines such as push notification dispatch, webhook fan-out, AI inference job scheduling, and audit log persistence. When Ethora runs on your own infrastructure, you control queue configuration, retention policies, and consumer scaling to match your traffic profile.
For enterprises in regulated verticals, persistent queues provide an additional delivery guarantee layer. Even if a downstream consumer (such as a compliance system or webhook endpoint) is momentarily unavailable, messages are retained and replayed, supporting the traceability requirements of healthcare and finance deployments.
