After being in a number of such projects I’ll just opt for Kafka or RabbitMQ. It’s too much pain trying to use an RDBMS as an append-only log with data expiration.
Kafka is amazing but the deployment story is quite bad – you need a Zookeeper most of the time, too. So either use a heavily managed Kafka hosting or suffer through putting Kafka in Docker/Kubernetes and never do it again. 
