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I find it interesting that I’ve never been bothered by these issues but the one I have isn’t mentioned. Difficulty in ensuring ordering, it seems like any time I consider a queue the lack of ordering guarantees forces significant complexity into the applications instead.

Not sure if I’m just buying into the Kafka hype but it seems like queues are the awkward middle ground between synchronous communications and message steams for many use cases.

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I'm in the same boat -- queues sound nice until the micro-picture at which point "spew it out" and "deal with it later" via message streams seems like the sane middle-ground across apps.

Hybrid cloud apps can do both, but in terms of complexity I agree: pushing increasing complexity into apps on the periphery over time seems like a big anti-pattern.

Some messaging systems have features to make ordering easier. For example, ActiveMQ has Message Groups (http://activemq.apache.org/message-groups.html) which guarantee a single consumer processes message from the same group and that it receives them in order.

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