OpenStack has had this as a common design pattern across a lot of the services for a while. It works quite well for us now - there was a period 2-3 years ago w

OpenStack has had this as a common design pattern across a lot of the services for a while. It works quite well for us now - there was a period 2-3 years ago where rabbitmq was the bane of my existence, and the cause of many a page but newer versions have been fine. We do assume that everything in the queue can go away, and only in flight calls will fail - and (at least in the service I work on) we do retries if something falls through the cracks. There is a shared library we use for it - http://docs.openstack.org/developer/oslo.messaging/ http://docs.openstack.org/developer/oslo.messaging/ It also has drivers for ZMQ, and QPID afaik.