Welcome back to TechTalks with Manoj — where we stop pretending distributed systems are simple and start designing them like they’re not.
Today’s topic: message queues beyond the basics.
On diagrams, they look clean — producers, brokers, consumers, done.
In production, they’re where consistency breaks, lag grows silently, and “exactly-once” turns out to mean “almost never.”
We’ll talk about delivery guarantees that actually matter, why idempotency is non-negotiable, how the outbox pattern saves you from data corruption, and when exactly-once is worth the cost — and when it absolutely isn’t.
If you’re building systems that have to survive retries, failures, and real traffic — not demos —
this episode is for you.
Let’s get started. 🎙️
