I read Hard Drive by James Wallace and Jim Erickson a couple years ago. It was written between Windows 3.1 and 95. Super interesting to read Microsoft history from the perspective of that time period. I loved it.
SQS, Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, QPID, etc… any message broker that provides the competing consumer pattern. though I’ll say having managed many of these message brokers myself, it’s definitely better paying for a managed service. They’re a nightmare when you start running into problems.
I’ve gotten a taste of that experience playing older multiplayer games that have a small player base. I much prefer it to games with millions of players where you’ll never see the people you play a match with again
I also love games with community ran servers for the same reason