IronMQ Handles 100 Million Messages a Day

Iron.io reached a key milestone on Christmas Eve this year. IronMQ, our cloud-based message queue, reached its first 100 million messages per day mark. To put this in perspective, Salesforce recently announced it's handling 1B transactions/day. Twitter has 140MM users tweeting 500MM times a day and Github records 500,000 events per day.

Handling 100 million messages a day is a solid milestone for us and we couldn’t be happier. The service was released in December 2011 and in the course of these 12 months we’ve seen strong growth. More and more cloud developers are realizing not only the benefits that message queues provide – we’ve listed a number of these reasons in a post on Top 10 Uses for a Message Queue – but also why cloud-based messaging makes so much sense.

The Rise of Distributed Cloud Computing

In our minds, hitting this mark really just lays down a marker on the start of new era of distributed cloud-based messaging and event-handling. We frequently hear people in the space saying the cloud changes everything. And while it’s true, we’re only at the beginning of what cloud computing and elastic services can truly provide.

Much of the news on cloud computing these days is focused on PaaS and IaaS. In other words, it’s about launching servers and deploying runtime apps. But behind every cloud-application of any complexity or size lies a number of independent processes, task workloads, and connections to other systems. All this activity needs a way of gluing these pieces together. Hence, the message queue.

[Y]ou can find a message queue in nearly every major architecture profile on HighScalability. Historically they may have been introduced after a first generation architecture needed to scale up from their two tier system into something a little more capable (asynchronicity, work dispatch, load buffering, database offloading, etc). If there's anything like a standard structural component, like an arch or beam in architecture for software, it's the message queue. 

 From HighScalability's repost of Top 10 Uses for a Message Queue

Top 10 Uses For A Message Queue

Ducks love queues.
Image by D.Hilgart.

We’ve been working with, building, and evangelising message queues for the last year, and it’s no secret that we think they’re awesome. We believe message queues are a vital component to any architecture or application, and here are ten reasons why:

1. Decoupling It’s extremely difficult to predict, at the start of a project, what the future needs of the project will be. By introducing a layer in between processes, message queues create an implicit, data-based interface that both processes implement. This allows you to extend and modify these processes independently, by simply ensuring they adhere to the same interface requirements.
2. Redundancy Sometimes processes fail when processing data. Unless that data is persisted, it’s lost forever. Queues mitigate this by persisting data until it has been fully processed. The put-get-delete paradigm, which many message queues use, requires a process to explicitly indicate that it has finished processing a message before the message is removed from the queue, ensuring your data is kept safe until you’re done with it.

Larger Free Tiers + New Pricing Plans

This week, we introduced some new pricing plans and as part of this, greatly expanded the free resources in our Free plans. It wasn't just a small increase. We went big – with a lot more free requests for IronMQ, many more free hours for IronWorker, and a ton of free space in IronCache

The thinking is pretty straight-forward. We want developers to get access to more messaging and processing power and make it even easier and faster to build great apps.

Free Developer Plans

 Free Resources in the Developer Plans

You can see the full set of resources on our Pricing page but here's a quick rundown:

• With IronMQ, developers get 10 million API requests free,
• With IronWorker, developers get 200 hours free,
• With IronCache, developers get 25MB of key/value store free.

Iron.io One Year Anniversary Drinkup... with a Gyrocycle!

One Year Celebration

A year ago we launched under the Iron.io brand and introduced IronMQ. Which means that it's a perfect occasion to celebrate the beginning of a second year with Iron.io Drinkup #4.

Come join us Friday, Dec 7th at Mars Bar. We're starting it in the late afternoon so it won't conflict with holiday events. Developers and friends from other cloud companies will be here which makes it just a larger more social community "office hour." 

Special Guest: Dezso Molnar and the Molnari Gyrocycle

But wait, there's more. If marking a year off wasn't enough, we're having Dezso Molnar and his Molnari Gyrocycle stop by to add a little metal on metal. (Gyrocycle is another way of saying street-legal flying motocycle.) If you think his machine is just a concept bike, think again. It's flown over 40 times and has been taken on the road up to speeds exceeding 100mph. 

Iron.io certified US-EU | US-Swiss Safe Harbor

Wanted to note that Iron.io is now certified to US-EU and US-Swiss Safe Harbor Frameworks effective as of today, December 3, 2012. A small matter for developers in the US but an important one for users in the EU and Switzerland.

Here's the language from our Privacy Policy:

7. International Safe Harbor Certifications

Iron.io complies with the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework and the U.S.-Swiss Safe Harbor Framework as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of personal information from European Union member countries and Switzerland. Iron.io has certified that it adheres to the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles of notice, choice, onward transfer, security, data integrity, access, and enforcement. 

To learn more about the Safe Harbor program, and to view Iron.io’s certification, please visit:    U.S.-EU & U.S.-Swiss Safe Harbor Frameworks