> Googling, I encountered something I hadn't heard of called a message queue.
Former high frequency trader here. Messaging middleware is a god-send for distributed systems. It used to be quite commonplace in the late 1990s/early 2000s for creating trading systems.
By mid-to-late 2000s - and especially post GFC (great financial crisis), volatility lowered, technology improved and middleware systems were never again put in the critical path.
The important measure here is "tick-to-trade" - from the moment a market-data message comes off the wire to the moment you send an action to buy/sell/cancel back on the wire. A middleware system just slows this down considerably. As a result, you want "tick-to-trade" to be in the same process, preferably single-threaded and boost your thread affinity to minimize context switching.
To answer your actual question: I would say learn about the concepts that the big cloud providers are pushing. If you open the AWS app drop down - there are dozens of concepts that have been encapsulated in managed or serverless frameworks. They are all worth learning IMHO - as they define the current and next generation of computing.
Message queues are really cool, but to paraphrase an old joke, "Some people see a distributed systems problem and think, "I know, I'll use a message queue." Now they have otw problems.
Former high frequency trader here. Messaging middleware is a god-send for distributed systems. It used to be quite commonplace in the late 1990s/early 2000s for creating trading systems.
By mid-to-late 2000s - and especially post GFC (great financial crisis), volatility lowered, technology improved and middleware systems were never again put in the critical path.
The important measure here is "tick-to-trade" - from the moment a market-data message comes off the wire to the moment you send an action to buy/sell/cancel back on the wire. A middleware system just slows this down considerably. As a result, you want "tick-to-trade" to be in the same process, preferably single-threaded and boost your thread affinity to minimize context switching.
To answer your actual question: I would say learn about the concepts that the big cloud providers are pushing. If you open the AWS app drop down - there are dozens of concepts that have been encapsulated in managed or serverless frameworks. They are all worth learning IMHO - as they define the current and next generation of computing.