Message Queuing Explained: A Coffee Shop Story
Written by: Elin Vinka
“What if we made a video explaining message queueing using a coffee shop analogy, where customers and their orders need an organized system to handle them?”
A couple of years ago, we made a movie that highlighted how deeply we rely on modern technology, and message queuing in particular. We loved how the movie turned out exactly as we hoped, but viewers kept asking the question: “How does it really work?”
Since 2012, we’ve been hosting message brokers and creating content about message queuing. We’ve written blogs, books, guides, comparisons, dictionaries and more. Throughout the years, we’ve also frequently talked about message queuing without any visual aids—no illustrations, books, or whiteboards, just creative explanations. Now, we wanted to turn these discussions into something visual. So we picked a topic close to everyone’s hearts: coffee.
Picture a coffee shop with one barista and many customers. Without a system to track orders, chaos ensues! Now, solve the situation by adding an ordering system and hire more baristas for busy times. This is how a message queue works in a system, and what we wanted to show in our video.
Enough explaining. Let’s watch!
We know firsthand that message queuing and streaming benefit many industries, we’ve seen it in action! People using our hosting service CloudAMQP come from industries like fintech, entertainment, healthcare, and retail and they use messaging for everything from background jobs to core operations.
Whether hosted or not, we’ll always be eager about sharing the value of message queuing with everyone, in whatever way works best.
Happy watching!
LavinMQ and CloudAMQP team