Amazon SQS

Now that’s quite a queue! Queues are a powerful way of combining software architectures. They allow for asynchronous communication between different systems, and are especially useful when the throughput of the systems is unequal.   Amazon offers their version of queues with Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service). For example, if you have something like: System A -…

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Iron was one of the pioneers of Serverless, so we’re excited to announce that we’ll also be one of the first companies to offer the next generation of compute:  It’s called Computerless™. Unlike Serverless, this technology removes the physical machine completely.  Our offering piggy-backs off the recent developments in fiber optic technology developed at the…

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Batch processing is one of the earliest ways of data processing, utilized by Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine in 1890. Batch processing was developed to take advantage of scarce computing resources: it avoids idling these expensive resources by queueing instructions to process data without manual user intervention, and can shift workload to times when resources are…

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Best Practices and anti-patterns for workers and message queues

Thanks to Ruth Hartnup for the base image! CC BY 2.0 If you’ve been programming for a while, it’s probable that someone, somewhere, has recommended the Gang of Four book. The book dissects Object Oriented programming. It lists numerous ways of royally messing things up, but it’s claim to fame is that it also lists…

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Thanks to Sonny Abesamis for the base image! CC BY 2.0 Increasingly, message queues and workers are intertwined with the language of modern infrastructure. You might rely on explicit solutions like IronMQ or IronWorker. You might not. Whether you do or don’t is irrelevant: MQs and workers are in everything these days. MQs and workers…

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This is the second post in a series on microservices. Read our previous post on the service computing environment: The Ephemeral Life of Dockerized Microservices. The use of microservices is a growing trend in application development because it provides an answer to the overhead incurred by monolithic applications. The practice of breaking apart application components…

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