References¶

IgnisMQ's core design was influenced by prior academic and industry work on building durable, distributed message queues over scalable key-value stores. This page documents those references.

HBaseMQ: A Durable Distributed Message Queue Service Based on HBase¶

Authors: Chen Zhang and Xue Liu (McGill University) Venue: IEEE INFOCOM 2013 Reference type: Academic inspiration

Summary¶

HBaseMQ describes a durable, distributed message queue built on top of HBase — a wide-column, distributed key-value store. The paper addresses the fundamental challenge of providing reliable message delivery guarantees without introducing a dedicated messaging broker, instead leveraging the persistence and scalability properties of the underlying store.

Key contributions of the paper:

• Persistent message storage in a distributed KV store — messages are stored as rows in HBase, giving durability and replication for free from the storage layer.
• Sharding for parallelism — queues are partitioned across HBase regions, allowing parallel producers and consumers to scale horizontally.
• Consumer coordination — the paper covers how multiple consumers can safely consume from a shared queue without double-processing messages.
• Message lifecycle management — describes the states a message moves through (enqueued → in-flight → acknowledged / dead-lettered) and how the system recovers from failures at each stage.

Relation to IgnisMQ¶

IgnisMQ applies the same foundational ideas using Aerospike as the storage layer instead of HBase:

The core insight — that a high-throughput, persistent message queue can be built directly on a scalable KV store without a dedicated broker — is the intellectual foundation of IgnisMQ.