Bingo - I work on the backend of a medical system and basically anything that interacts with a 3rd party gets put into a queue so our application doesn't choke

Bingo - I work on the backend of a medical system and basically anything that interacts with a 3rd party gets put into a queue so our application doesn't choke immediately when one of them has issues. We also have some uses for it within our system. As far as the question, I was thinking that queues have probably just become a standard aspect of modern distributed systems; it's considered a pretty foundational cloud service for any provider (though we just run RabbitMQ ourselves and it has worked well for us).