What is a message queue?

Message queues are software components that enable asynchronous communication between different parts of a system by allowing messages to be sent, stored, and retrieved in a queue. This helps decouple the sender and receiver, improving system scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance. Commonly used in distributed systems and microservices, message queues ensure that data can be processed even if parts of the system are temporarily unavailable. Popular message queue technologies include RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, and Amazon SQS.