Embodiments of the invention relate to message queuing. In one embodiment, a request from an application for retrieving a message from a queue is received. The queue is stored across multiple nodes of a distributed storage system. A preference with respect to message order and message duplication associated with the queue is identified. A message sequence index associated with the queue is sampled based on the preference that has been identified. The message is selected in response to the sampling. The message that has been selected is made unavailable to other applications for a given interval of time, while maintaining the message in the queue. The message is sent to the application.