Google Cloud Pub/Sub - Publish test message - testing

Does Cloud Pub/Sub support publishing test messages, i.e. messages that are truly published but not forwarded to the subscribers, to verify the integration between your application and the remote Cloud Pub/Sub?
I could imagine doing this manually by setting a test attribute flag for such messages so that subscribers can filter them out. I know that there also exists the Cloud Pub/Sub emulator for local testing but I was wondering if there exists such a feature?

No. This feature doesn't exists. However, your subscriber should be tolerant to error and not compliant messages.
I suggest to publish a wrong message. Your integration is tested, and the subscriber behavior and fault tolerance also. Bonus, you can filter log Trace of your subscribers in the stackdriver logging service and create an alert in case of wrong message received, in real production environment

Related

RabbitMQ and IoT device: keep queue open?

We're using RabbitMQ in a new project. We'll have IoT devices communicating with queues.
For the devices to send info to the cloud we don't see any issues, however sometimes we need to deliver messages from our backend to the IoT devices. For this we let the devices open an exclusive queue. This works perfectly, as long as the devices are online. When they aren't, the queue is closed and no messages can be send to it anymore.
Is there a way to keep the queue open, so messages are kept until the IoT device comes back online?
Vice-versa: Is there some way to have guaranteed delivery starting at the IoT device. For example: energy measurements every 15 minutes. If the connection drops, messages should be stored on disk (to prevent message loss in case of power cut). They are sent later on when the connection comes back online. Does a service or client library exist that implements this or do we need to develop this ourselves?
Is there a way to keep the queue open, so messages are kept until the
IoT device comes back online?
Use a regular queue, and make sure it's durable if you'd like it to survive RabbitMQ restarts.
Is there some way to have guaranteed delivery starting at the IoT
device.
That depends on the library you are using, but you don't tell us what library nor what protocol you're using (AMQP vs MQTT, for instance).
Some libraries offer automatic reconnect and re-creation of topology (queues, exchanges, etc) but I'm not aware of any that offer local storage of messages until the broker is available again. You'll have to code that yourself.
Please carefully read the documentation with regard to publisher confirmations and consumer acknowledgements, as those are both necessary for reliable messaging link.
NOTE: the RabbitMQ team monitors the rabbitmq-users mailing list and only sometimes answers questions on StackOverflow.
Our Cloud has several exchanges and credentials called CredentialsBucket assigned to a set of IoT devices. When an IoT device register, we provide them this credentials that includes a durable queue and exchange. When the IoT device push messages, it goes to Cloud through the exchange where we do additional security check using HMAC.
When Cloud send a message, it send it directly to his queue (no persistent messages in our case) and the IoT device do the same kind of security check.

How to handle failed publish with RabbitMq?

We are planning to use RabbitMq for our messaging service, we'll publish all the message requests to a RabbitMq durable queue.
For .Net client we've decided to use EasyNetQ, so the question is how should we handle RabbitMq server being while publishing a message?
Should we catch exception and save the message to database and
re-publish with scheduled job?
Should we use circuit-breaker?
or what else? I'd like to hear your experiences.
In general if you want to be sure about the publish you can use the publish confirmation.
as you can read, you can do that using the transactions or with ConfirmListener.
To handle the broker fails, you can store locally the failed messages then try to re-send them after x seconds.
Note: I don't know how EasyNetQ works, but the native publish is asynchronous, so trap the publish exceptions is not enough. That's why you should use publish confirm to deal with it.

Does RabbitMQ contain functionality to deal with offline target nodes

Being new to the RabbitMQ I was wondering how to deal with an offline target node.
As an example this scenario:
1 log recording application that stores logs to some persistent storage
N log publishing applications that want their logs to be written to the persistent storage via the log recording server.
There would be two options:
Each publishing application publishes it's log messages to it's local RabbitMQ instance and the log recording server must subscribe to each of these
The log recording application has it's local RabbitMQ instance on which each log publishing application delivers it's messages.
Option 1 would require me to reconfigure/recode/notify the recording application each time a new application appears or moves. Therefore I would think Option 2 is the right one, each new publishing application simply writes to the RabbitMQ Node of the recording application.
The only thing I am struggling with is how to deal with a situation in which the Node of the recording application is down. Do I need to build my own system to store the messages until it's back online or can I use some functionality of RabbitMQ to deal with that? I.e. could the local RabbitMQ of each of the publishing applications just receive the messages and forward them to the recording application RabbitMQ as soon as it's back online?
I found something about the Federated plugin be couldn't understand if that's the solution. Maybe I need something different or maybe I have to write my own local queueing system (which I hope I don't have to) to queue messages when the target Node is offline.
Any links to architectural examples or solutions are more than welcome.
BTW: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/easynetq/nILIKSjxyMg states that you shouldn't be installing a RabbitMQ Node for each application, so maybe I should resort to something like MSQM or ZeroMQ (?)
From experience in what sounds like a similar situation, I would suggest using something other than a queue to store the messages locally, when offline.
Years ago, I built a system that had to work offline - no network connection at all - and then had to push messages through a message queue to the central server, when the laptop was brought back to the office.
I solved this by using a local database (sqlite at the time) to store my messages when the message queue was not available.
You should do something similar. Use a local database or even a plain text file or CSV file to store your messages when RabbitMQ is offline. When it reconnects, read the messages from your local file system and send them through RabbitMQ.
This is a good strategy to use, even if you do not expect RabbitMQ to go offline. Frankly, it will go offline at some point and you will have to deal with it. You should be prepared for that situation, and having a local store for your messages will help that.
...
regarding rqm node per application: bad idea. this adds a ton of complexity to your system. You want as few RabbitMQ nodes as you can get away with. Meaning, 1 per system (a system being comprised of many applications) when possible... with the exception of RabbitMQ clusters for availability - but that's another line of questions and design, entirely.
...
I did an interview with Aria Stewart about designing for failure with RabbitMQ and messaging systems, and have a small excerpt where she talks about how networks fail.
The point is, the network or RabbitMQ or something will fail and you will need a solution like a local datastore so that you can recover when RabbitMQ comes back online.

Redis PUB/SUB: how to ignore own messages?

The idea is:
I have N WCF services which connected and subscribed to the same Redis message channel. These services use this channel to exchange messages to sync some caches and other data.
How each service can ignore its own messages? I.e. how to publish to all but me?
It looks like Redis PUB/SUB doesn't support such filtration. So, the solution is to use set of individual channels for every publisher and common channel for subscription synchronization between them. Here is an golang example of no-echo chat application.

NserviceBus - What happens to a message if the server is offline

I went thought NServiceBus documentation including the durable messaging one. What I understand is that when the server is offline the messages continue to go into the server's input queue which get picked up when server comes back online.
But what if the server is completely down and the input queue is not accessible?
I'm using Bus.Send from the client.
It depends on what transport you're using.
In the case of a brokered message queue, like Azure Service Bus, as long as that service is available, the fact the machine that will eventually retrieve the messages is offline is irrelevant, as that machine is simply asking the external queuing service for messages. The same goes for a transport like SQL Server.
In the case of a transport like MSMQ, which is a store a forward style queue, the messages will remain in a local outgoing queue until the remote machine becomes available.
Can you double check that you are looking in the correct spot? If you aren't getting an error out of NServiceBus when you Send, then MSMQ is installed. If it can't be reached or the service is stopped you should get errors.
The Outbound queues are in a different place as illustrated here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-components-postattachments/00-09-06-31-16/outgoingempty.JPG
As RMD indicated, this is an advantage of the store and forward MSMQ transport.. the local outbound queue should just stack these up until the remote server is available.
Thx.
Joe