SoftLayer Technologies on Thursday announced the launch of the SoftLayer Message Queue service, a cost-effective messaging and notification service that scales seamlessly to support development of bigger, bottleneck-free applications.

"Message Queue is built to scale easily, giving web and app developers unlimited potential to grow virtually any type of application," said Duke Skarda, chief technology officer for SoftLayer. "This new service provides a means to pass control flow and information between application servers deployed across our global platform. The uses for a service like this are endless. And since we developed this in partnership with our managed database as a service partner, Cloudant, the persistence and scalability are rock solid."

SoftLayer Message Queue combines robust and scalable messaging queuing and notification services into a single solution, integrated with the company's global platform and allowing for secure transmission between geographically distributed processes across SoftLayer's global private network.

SoftLayer Message Queue is an extremely scalable way for independent software systems to communicate with one another. Message Queue enables different scalable inter-process communication without having to worry about a component generating too much traffic for the system to handle. The service can make it easier to complete asynchronous tasks such as resizing uploaded images to generate assets in different resolutions; reformatting videos to match browser requirements; and easily handle such tasks as bulk processing, data synchronization and aggregation.

SoftLayer developed the Message Queue service in partnership with Cloudant, which gives users a highly scalable, low latency data layer for storing and distributing messages.

"Our work with SoftLayer on this new queuing service is another facet in the ongoing collaboration between our companies," said Derek Schoettle, chief executive officer for Cloudant. "This partnership leverages our joint experience to create a solution that delivers benefits to cloud users who demand unparalleled performance and flexibility to grow as their business demands."

Driven by a RESTful Web services API, SoftLayer Message Queue also provides language bindings for languages including Ruby, Python, Java, PHP and C#. SoftLayer Message Queue is integrated with the company's customer portal to provide real-time monitoring and control of the service.

SoftLayer Message Queue is available now and at no charge to customers who require 100,000 or fewer requests and/or notifications each month. Above that threshold, Message Queue will cost one cent for each additional 10,000 requests or notifications.