zlacker

Locking is no longer 100% reliable as soon as you have horizontal distribution of the same data over multiple nodes (for redundancy, so you can guarantee delivery) instead of sourcing from e.g. a monolithic rdbms. Eventual consistency is the model for a whole lot of distributed systems, e.g. S3 or Mongo. The CAP theorem applies to more than just databases, so MQs tend to use eventual consistency as well, which looks like at-least-once and not guaranteed exactly-once delivery.

While dealing with at-most-once delivery is easier in isolation as an application developer on the consumer side, dealing with lost messages is in practice MUCH MUCH harder on the producer side than idempotent handling where required on the consumer side. You end up building elaborate mechanisms for locking and retries and receipt validation which can all fail.

Just think about emails, there are a lot of situations where you can't be 100% certain whether the other side received the message or not. For something low-priority it may be better to ignore partial failures, but if it's important it may be better to send a second message to guarantee delivery. If you're modeled on never sending the same message twice AND the messages matter, you're in trouble.