RabbitMQ as both Producer and Consumer in a single application - rabbitmq

I am currently learning RabbitMQ and AMQP in general. I started working with some tutorials I found online and all of them show more or less the same example - a Spring Boot web app that, upon a REST call, produces a message and puts in onto a RabbitMQ queue and then, another class from the same app, which is configured as the Consumer of that message consumes it and processes the handler method.
I can't wrap my head around why this is beneficial in any way. The upside I understand is that the handler is executed in a separate thread, while the controller method can return right after sending the message to the queue. However, why would this be in any way better than just using Spring's #Async annotation on that handler method and calling it explicitly? In that case I suppose we would achieve the same thing, while not having to host and manage a seperate instance of a message broker like RabbitMQ.
Can someone please explain? Thanks.

Very simply:
with RabbitMq you can have persistent messages and a much safer and consistent exception management. In case the machine crashes, already pushed messages are not lost.
A message can be pushed to an exchange and consumed by more parallel consumers, that helps scaling the application in case the consumer code is too slow.
and a lot of other reasons...

Related

Is there a way to handle messages directly from the Rebus error queue

Currently I have an IErrorHandler implementation dealing with messages going to the Rebus error queue. That handler then publishes messages to a saga that throttles output to a Slack notification channel. I think there may be an easier way to do this though. I would like to have the saga implement an IHandleMessages against messages from the Rebus error queue itself. Is that possible? Currently, we have the FleetManager process enabled and for my custom IErrorHandler to work it has to dual publish errors both to the error queue and to FleetManager using the FleetManager API options. This allows my IErrorHandler to be called so I can publish a custom message to start the slack saga and also feeds FleetManager with the data it needs. The problem with my approach is that the Rebus error queue just grows with data I no longer care about. So I guess my question is: is there a way to handle those Rebus error queue messages? Or perhaps even better, is there a simple way to make those error queue messages go away once I know I have them in my saga?
Note: the reason for the saga and to not simply use a FleetManager Slack web hook is to notify based on custom count thresholds of errors, rather than for every error encountered.
I think I just realized one approach I could take, which is to still use my custom IErrorHandler, yet not actually handle the poison message so that it never makes it to the error queue regardless. Instead I would just publish my custom message that is handled by the saga.

ActiveMQ CMS: Can messages be lost between creating a consumer and setting a listener?

Setting up a CMS consumer with a listener involves two separate calls: first, acquiring a consumer:
cms::MessageConsumer* cms::Session::createConsumer( const cms::Destination* );
and then, setting a listener on the consumer:
void cms::MessageConsumer::setMessageListener( cms::MessageListener* );
Could messages be lost if the implementation subscribes to the destination (and receives messages from the broker/router) before the listener is activated? Or are such messages queued internally and delivered to the listener upon activation?
Why isn't there an API call to create the consumer with a listener as a construction argument? (Is it because the JMS spec doesn't have it?)
(Addendum: this is probably a flaw in the API itself. A more logical order would be to instantiate a consumer from a session, and have a cms::Consumer::subscribe( cms::Destination*, cms::MessageListener* ) method in the API.)
I don't think the API is flawed necessarily. Obviously it could have been designed a different way, but I believe the solution to your alleged problem comes from the start method on the Connection object (inherited via Startable). The documentation for Connection states:
A CMS client typically creates a connection, one or more sessions, and a number of message producers and consumers. When a connection is created, it is in stopped mode. That means that no messages are being delivered.
It is typical to leave the connection in stopped mode until setup is complete (that is, until all message consumers have been created). At that point, the client calls the connection's start method, and messages begin arriving at the connection's consumers. This setup convention minimizes any client confusion that may result from asynchronous message delivery while the client is still in the process of setting itself up.
A connection can be started immediately, and the setup can be done afterwards. Clients that do this must be prepared to handle asynchronous message delivery while they are still in the process of setting up.
This is the same pattern that JMS follows.
In any case I don't think there's any risk of message loss regardless of when you invoke start(). If the consumer is using an auto-acknowledge mode then messages should only be automatically acknowledged once they are delivered synchronously via one of the receive methods or asynchronously through the listener's onMessage. To do otherwise would be a bug in my estimation. I've worked with JMS for the last 10 years on various implementations and I've never seen any kind of condition where messages were lost related to this.
If you want to add consumers after you've already invoked start() you could certainly call stop() first, but I don't see any problem with simply adding them on the fly.

Implementing the reliability pattern in CloudHub with VM queues

I have more-or-less implemented the Reliability Pattern in my Mule application using persistent VM queues CloudHub, as documented here. While everything works fine, it has left me with a number of questions about actually ensuring reliable delivery of my messages. To illustrate the points below, assume I have http-request component within my "application logic flow" (see the diagram on the link above) that is throwing an exception because the endpoint is down, and I want to ensure that the in flight message will eventually get delivered to the endpoint:
As detailed on the link above, I have observed that when the exception is thrown within my "application logic flow", and I have made the flow transactional, the message is put back on the VM queue. However all that happens is the message then repeatedly taken off the queue, processed by the flow, and the exception is thrown again - ad infinitum. There appears to be no way of configuring any sort of retry delay or maximum number of retries on VM queues as is possible, for example, with ActiveMQ. The best work around I have come up with is to surround the http-request message processor with the until-successful scope, but I'd rather have these sorts of things apply to my whole flow (without having to wrap the whole flow in until-successful). Is this sort of thing possible using only VM queues and CloudHub?
I have configured my until-successful to place the message on another VM queue which I want to use as a dead-letter-queue. Again, this works fine, and I can login to CloudHub and see the messages populated on my DLQ - but then it appears to offer no way of moving messages from this queue back into the flow when the endpoint comes back up. All it seems you can do in CloudHub is clear your queue. Again, is this possible using VM queues and CloudHub only (i.e. no other queueing tool)?
VM queues are very basic, whether you use them in CloudHub or not.
VM queues have no capacity for delaying redelivery (like exponential back-offs). Use JMS queues if you need such features.
You need to create a flow for processing the DLQ, for example one that regularly consumes the queue via the requester module and re-injects the messages into the main queue. Again, with JMS, you would have better control.
Alternatively to JMS, you could consider hosted queues like CloudAMQP, Iron.io or AWS SQS. You would lose transaction support on the inbound endpoint but would gain better control on the (re)delivery behaviour.

How do I clean messages in the queue if producer is down

I'm using ActiveMQ and I would like to know how to solve this specific case.
When the consumer is down, the producer sends a message to the queue. The message will remain in the queue until the consumer is running to consume it.
Now imagine I shutdown the producer, the message will STILL remain in the queue. Now i run the consumer and it will try to consume that message, but won't be able to reply back to the producer since its down.
I would like to solve this problem by cleaning the messages if the producer is out.
The ActiveMQ Broker cleans the Queue after stopping. I would like to do the same for the messages of a respective producer.
Thanks.
Based on what I understand now from your question and additional comments I propose to add a Message Property to your messages to identify the Producer, and write a small utility that uses a Message Selector to read all messages matching the Producer from the queue. You can run that utility straight after the Producer is stopped (or crashes), and that should quite accurately do what you want to achieve.
EDIT: although primarily focused on EE, the Sun/Oracle JavaEE Tutorial contains a very good chapter on general JMS programming that starts off with standalone producers and consumers. The accompanying source code bundle can be downloaded here, the ready to comoile samples in that bundle should get you started very quickly.
You can solve it a couple of ways. One is to set a TTL on the message so it goes away. The other is to connect via JMX and purge the Queue or remove the specific message using a selector statement or with the Message's specific MessageId value.
See this article for some hints.

Why is pausing a queue not a broker function?

I was looking for an ActiveMQ broker admin command, to tell it to pause a queue - that is:
continue accepting messages from producing clients
cease delivering to consuming clients, allowing the queue backlog to grow until the queue is resumed, whereupon the backlog is sent to clients.
I was unable to find such a command. The commonest answer was that it should be managed at the client end -- that is, locate every consumer and stop it. Other answers were workarounds, like manipulating network routes or firewalls so that the clients and broker could no longer communicate.
A cursory survey of other message queues indicates that ActiveMQ is not unusual in this regard.
It seems to me there are two reasons this functionality might not be implemented:
It is difficult to implement -- but I can't think of any reason why.
It is counter to the design philosophy of message queues
Which is it, and why?
Being able to pause a queue is supported in the newly released ActiveMQ 5.12.0:
When the queue is "paused":
NO messages sent to the associate consumers
messages still to be enqueued on the queue
ability to be able to browse the queue
all the JMX counters for the queue to be available and correct.
...
implemented pause/resume/isPaused queue view mbean ops and attribute
when paused, there is no dispatch to regular queue consumers, send
and browse work as normal. Any inflight messages will continue inflight
till ackes as normal.
See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AMQ-5229
If you have Jolokia enabled (I think it is enabled by default nowadays), you can use something like the following curl request to pause the queue:
curl --user admin:admin http://127.0.0.1:8161/api/jolokia/exec/org.apache.activemq:brokerName=localhost,destinationName=myQueue,destinationType=Queue,type=Broker/pause
(Using the default username, password and broker name and a queue called myQueue)
Replace "pause" with "resume" in order to resume the queue.
Probably not too complicated to implement - as you say.
I don't know if it's an active design decision of if there has been no demand. Other similar products such as IBM WebSphere MQ implements "get/put inhibited" on queues, so it's obviously is not totally against the philosofy of messaging - rather a tool to operate and trouble shoot live systems.
I'm a bit biased, but I actually like to decouple the sender from the receive (if the are two different systems, that might eventually get switched/upgraded/changed..).
An easy way to decouple the systems, and be able to do what you want is to make the sender send to one queue "DATA.OUT" and the receiver listen to another "DATA.IN". Then you can use Apache Camel (which is typically bundled with ActiveMQ to achieve Enterprise Integration Patterns), to route from DATA.OUT to DATA.IN.
A Camel Route is possible to start/stop via JMX, which will achieve something similar to what you described.
I guess ActiveMQ design in the matter rather have you do these kind of things in a middleware layer, such as Apache Camel, rather than direct on the queues.