> it seems like a message broker is an over-engineered piece of garbage you shouldn't ever use in projects that demand reliable, well-understood technology Thi

> it seems like a message broker is an over-engineered piece of garbage you shouldn't ever use in projects that demand reliable, well-understood technology This is not because you do not understand how message broker works that they are not simple. Message brokers implement "reliable, well-understood" protocols, and you do not need to have engineers who "specialize in understanding message broker technology". This is downright FUD. The little complexity of those protocols is here for a reason, and, seriously, we're not talking Enterprise Java complexity. It's just like saying that you could use bash scripts to automate your infrastructure unless you have Google scale, because Puppet, Chef, or Ansible are too complex and over-engineered. Writing a database-backed RESTful service for a message queue is not without reminding me of those who reimplement RDBMS over MongoDB because RDBMSes are "over engineered". If the AMQP protocol is too complex for you, there are other, simple protocols that message brokers implement.