We hit a wall once—literally. Our backend crashed during a peak event due to synchronous overloads. The fix wasn’t bigger servers; it was better architecture.
Message queues helped us:
- Decouple ingestion from processing
- Introduce graceful degradation
- Add retry mechanisms and dead-letter paths
Since then, queues became a default tool in my design toolbox. The key isn’t just adding a queue—it’s designing for failure across the pipe.