Choosing Retry Boundaries for Node.js Worker Pools: SQS, RabbitMQ, or BullMQ

The article argues that the key question for a rate-limited worker pool is who owns a failed delivery and what happens after the final attempt, not which queue is fastest. Amazon SQS suits small teams that want managed operations and a policy-driven dead-letter queue for repeated failures. RabbitMQ offers broker-level control and routing flexibility, but the team must build its own retry and dead-letter logic. BullMQ provides a Node.js-oriented job API with explicit retry and backoff, though it makes Redis part of the reliability boundary. In every option, the author recommends making the worker idempotent to avoid duplicate updates and endless requeue loops.