I'm confused: how do you use message queues to handle traffic spikes? If a user request is sitting in a queue, aren't they staring at a white screen until I get back to them?<p>edit: "And you can launch more servers to eat away at the queues if they keep growing." sounds a lot like autoscaling to me. The graph is misleading.
So, I understand they're trying to sell their product here, but please...<p>In most web-apps there is exactly <i>one</i> user-initiated task that can be deferred: sending e-mail. Last time I checked my "spikability" was not bound on sending e-mails.
I was going to use iron.io for a Hackathon, but didn't end up finding a way to use it in my project. I looked through the docs though and it's really interesting.