My answer, as someone who recently switched an AMQP backend to using redis for queues and pub/sub broadcast: AMQP is wrong the same way RDBMSes or Java are "wro

My answer, as someone who recently switched an AMQP backend to using redis for queues and pub/sub broadcast: AMQP is wrong the same way RDBMSes or Java are "wrong." It's too heavy, too slow, or too complex for a great-many use cases. There's a long tradition that seems to be (mercifully) fading of ornately engineered solutions being developed for the most demanding of problem domains, and then subsequently being universally adopted for projects large and small because if "it's good enough for the enterprise, it's good enough for me". It's a variation of the "nobody ever got fired..." mentality. The truth is that something with a radically reduced feature set, that's simpler to use and understand, is really all that's needed to meet a whole lot of "real world" use cases. Read the AMQP-0.8 spec sometime. It's rather complex given that a _huge_ percentage of users just want a set of features something like: 1. A namespace to name queues 2. The ability to put things on and pull things off in FIFO order 3. The ability to persist those things on daemon start/stop (maybe) 4. Pub/sub style broadcast behavior with lossy messaging (maybe) So redis, as an example: antirez (half-accidentally) got a lot of attention from weary queueing-system wanderers by implementing a majority of these capabilities with just a few redis commands--(l,r)push and (l,r)pop. Redis was so close to a simple, but full replacement for what they actually do with ActiveMQ, Rabbit, etc, that they begged for B(L,R)POP on many keys and PUB/SUB. And that pretty much covers it. Of course, redis is just one of a number of other project/protocols are stealing attention from AMQP systems, like ZeroMQ, beanstalkd, etc. But the larger trend is like Linux::"UNIX", Ruby::Java, MongoDB::Postgres, etc. Despite the hell-and-damnation warnings often bandied about by the enterprisey experts, you really can build a wide array of very useful things using these "toy" tools.