I have to say that I have never really had a positive impression of zeromq. I feel like it is particularly unsuccessful and that seems to be for some pretty good reasons. Zeromq is a bag of tools and it's not really clear to me how a novice would put them together safely. This is important for a message system because everyone has to start somewhere and it really shouldn't be "step 1: build your broker with our subro…
We’ve used ZeroMQ in production as an alternative to HTTP message passing and it was great for that. We would build something like RabbitMQ atop of ZMQ, the only similarity between the two being the name, really.