Integration Discussions and Vendor Strategies

Message Queuing at it's finest point is an art-form. It shouldn't be, of course, but it is. Most people won't need too high a quality of artist to work on their message system but, at the highest level of requirements you're going to need a Van Gogh working with you :-) I'm going to describe here a few pointers as to what to do when the message producers in a system are producing messages quicker than the consumers can process them or, as I would prefer to say, 'the consumers are processing the messages too slowly' ;-)

Customers often suggest that they want 'ordered messaging'. Many messaging providers suggest that they will give you ordered messaging. You'll see concepts like 'ordered queues' being discussed in many products. However, as always with one-liners, the devil is in the details.

I spend a lot of time at the moment doing things like capacity planning and telling people how many servers to put into their cluster. To my mind this sort of thing is how the world used to work and the future (looking from where we are today) is PAAS (Platform As A Service). In this blog I'll try to explain why I say that...