Message queues play a crucial role in modern software and system architectures by enabling asynchronous communication between decoupled services or layers, such as web service APIs, database systems, and serverless functions. They act as a buffering component that manages the distribution of messages from producers, who create and send messages, to consumers, who process them. This setup allows producers and consumers to operate independently, often on separate machines and in different programming languages, which facilitates scalability and resilience. The asynchronous nature of message queues permits producers to continue their tasks without waiting for immediate responses, while consumers manage the processing of queued messages at a sustainable rate, preventing overload during traffic spikes. Despite the increased architectural complexity, the benefits of using message queues, such as enhanced scalability and fault tolerance, make them an integral part of scalable systems, with both open-source frameworks and third-party services available to ease their implementation.