TL;DR: For a fintech reservation that must expire after a fixed hold window, the important choice is not which queue retries fastest. It is where the expiration decision is made, how a failed attempt becomes visible again, and whether an operator can recover it without guessing. Kafka gives a durable event stream and explicit replay control; Amazon SQS gives queue-oriented redelivery and visibility timeouts; RabbitMQ makes acknowledgement and requeue semantics very direct. The recovery procedure around those primitives matters more than the product label.

A reservation should expire from a timestamp stored with the business record, not from the moment a retry message happens to arrive. A worker can receive an expire-reservation job late, receive it twice, or finish after another worker has already acted. The handler therefore needs an idempotent state transition such as HELD -> EXPIRED , guarded by the reservation version and the hold deadline. A retry mechanism can deliver work again.…