# twitter-archive/kestrel

simple, distributed message queue system (inactive)

Repository: https://github.com/twitter-archive/kestrel
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/kestrel
Homepage: http://twitter.github.io/kestrel
Language: Scala
License: NOASSERTION
License Family: other
Archived: true
Last push: 2016-01-22T07:54:28+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 6708, "days_push": 3876, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, archived, no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 2753, forks 308 (observed 2026-08-28T04:07:18.110820+00:00)

## What it is
Kestrel is a simple, distributed message queue system written in Scala, originally developed at Twitter and based on Starling. It offers fast, durable, reliable queues with loose ordering across a cluster, but is now deprecated and unmaintained.

## Use cases
- run a simple distributed message queue on the JVM
- queue messages durably with disk journaling
- scale message queues horizontally without cluster coordination
- reliably hand off messages when clients crash
- replace starling with a more robust message queue

## When to choose
- you need a small, fast, easy-to-deploy queue and can accept loose ordering
- you want durable queues without heavy clustering machinery
- you're maintaining a legacy system already built on Kestrel

## When to avoid
- you need strong global ordering or transactions
- you need an actively maintained project with fixes and support
- you operate at very large scale with diverse workloads
- you need modern features like rich routing or streaming semantics

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: abandoned
- function: message-queue
- domain: microservices, backend
- platform: jvm, self-hosted
- tags: scala, deprecated, memcache-protocol, durable-queues, messaging, linux

## Member repositories
- twitter-archive/kestrel (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:18.110820+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T08:18:54.044168+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/twitter-archive/kestrel (fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:18.110820+00:00, sha 87206937d537)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.