> Are you saying that this is bad? It doesn't seem so.

It's not "bad" per se, but it's not what it seems on the surface.

ACKing a message doesn't mean that the message will not be received more than one time. As long as the smarts for recognizing recycled messages are embedded in the application logic, all will be fine.

Here's a good explanation written about SQS, but applies to all message technologies that work based on ACKs: https://sookocheff.com/post/messaging/dissecting-sqs-fifo-qu...

So, while it's possible to add more consumers, depending on the implementation of the technology's internals for tracking consumer state, you may loose messages or, more typically, receive messages more than once or receive them out of order.

This often happens without the developers' and operators' knowledge. Without foreknowledge of the causes and effects of these things, developers and operators may know there there's some kind of strange intermittent glitch, but don't presume that it's because message processors are processing messages that had already previously been processed (or are not processing messages that had been skipped).

What you can't do is add a new consumer that is interested in processing historical messages beyond the retention window of typical cloud-hosted message transports.

But that's ok because message queues are typically just transports, not message stores, and they serve the needs of moving messages from one place to another. A message store can do that as well, but has different semantics and serves other needs.

So, as long as ACK-based message processors work within the retention window, everything's good. It's when that's not the case that the problems arise. Lost messages and recycled messages are pretty much the only guarantee over the lifetime of a messaging app. As long as that's within tolerances, then it's fine.

Specifically, like all "dumb pipe" technology that came about in the post-SOA age, a message store doesn't use a protocol based on ACKs. Instead, a consumer tracks its own state and does not defer this responsibility to the transport.

And inevitably, if any consumer of any technology wants to guarantee that it never processes a recycled message, this tracking logic has to also be implemented in the application logic of even SQS, RabbitMQ, etc consumers.

There's no such thing as a messaging technology that can guarantee only-once delivery, as you alluded to. There's a good examination of this aspect of messaging and distributed systems here: https://bravenewgeek.com/you-cannot-have-exactly-once-delive...

The best guarantee from message transports that we can hope for amounts to a "maybe". And that's ok. The conditions and countermeasures are well-known. As long as we're not blind-sided and haven't taken "only once" literally, things will be fine.

If we don't realize that application logic is always responsible for making the ultimate decision as to whether to reject a recycled message, we're going to have problems that can be difficult-to-impossible to detect and correct.

Message stores and event stores aren't alternatives to message queues. They're technologies that support architectures that are themselves alternatives to each other.