Message Queue (MQ)

A Message Queue (MQ) is a system designed for asynchronous communication, typically between different services, using point-to-point or publish-subscribe patterns (e.g., RabbitMQ, SQS). While they handle message buffering and delivery, MQs traditionally focus on transient message delivery and may lack the strong ordering guarantees, long-term persistence, and replay capabilities of log-based Event Streaming Platforms like Kafka, which are more commonly paired with stream processors.