Software Engineering · Distributed Systems
A durable buffer that holds messages between a producer and a consumer, decoupling them so the producer doesn't block waiting for the consumer to be ready.
Example: A job queue where an API server drops work items (resize this image) and a worker process picks them up asynchronously.
In practice: Queues trade immediacy for resilience — the producer can keep running even if the consumer is slow or temporarily down. The tradeoff is operational complexity and the need to handle duplicate delivery.