I am coming from IBM/Oracle messaging system and in front of decisions about picking message broker for SOA/microservices architecture. Common candidate was ActiveMQ from open-source space. But I am really not sure after reading this document by IBM:
https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?htmlfid=WSW14229USEN
Messages lost or duplicated is really not something I would like to investigate :-)
Question: Can someone confirm this IBM paper is valid from his/her real-world experience with ActiveMQ running in multi-broker network cluster, or even master/slave? Or in general is ActiveMQ known to really duplicate/lost messages on outage?
Related
Sorry for what may seem a simple question to some, but.
Currently use RMQ for pretty simple client/Queue/Consumer type transactions. Some use return message queues, while others are just simple 'jobs'.
Looking to distribute between 'sites' and for use-cases of RMQ-Clustering with nodes that are not co-located, ie: on WAN.
Has anyone done such a thing, or should I bite-the-bullet and move to ActiveMQ/Artemis.
Thank you for any insights.
ActiveMQ 5's network connectors are designed to support the "long link" or WAN connectivity pattern (along with others). The messaging pattern is known as 'store-and-forward'. It supports one-way push, bi-directional and pull approaches.
Network of Brokers
ref: https://activemq.apache.org/networks-of-brokers
My team wants to move to microservices architecture. Currently we are using Redis Pub/Sub as message broker for some legacy parts of our system. My colleagues think that it is naturally to continue use redis as service bus as they don't want spend their time on studying new product. But in my opinion RabbitMQ (especially with MassTransit) is a better approach for microservices. Could you please compare Redis Pub/Sub with Rabbit MQ and give me some arguments for Rabbit?
Redis is a fast in-memory key-value store with optional persistence. The pub/sub feature of Redis is a marginal case for Redis as a product.
RabbitMQ is the message broker that does nothing else. It is optimized for reliable delivery of messages, both in command style (send to an endpoint exchange/queue) and publish-subscribe. RabbitMQ also includes the management plugin that delivers a helpful API to monitor the broker status, check the queues and so on.
Dealing with Redis pub/sub on a low level of Redis client can be a very painful experience. You could use a library like ServiceStack that has a higher level abstraction to make it more manageable.
However, MassTransit adds a lot of value compared to raw messaging over RMQ. As soon as you start doing stuff for real, no matter what transport you decide to use, you will hit typical issues that are associated with messaging like handling replies, scheduling, long-running processes, re-delivery, dead-letter queues, and poison queues. MassTransit does it all for you. Neither Redis or RMQ client would deliver any of those. If your team wants to spend time dealing with those concerns in their own code - that's more like reinventing the wheel. Using the argument of "not willing to learn a new product" in this context sounds a bit weird, since, instead of delivering value for the product, developers want to spend their time dealing with infrastructure concerns.
RabbitMQ is far more stable and robust than Redis for passing messages.
RabbitMQ is able to hold and store a message if there is no consumer for it (e.g. your listener crashed , etc).
RabbitMQ has different methods for communication: Pub/Sub , Queue. That you can use for load balancing , etc
Redis is convenient for simple cases. If you can afford losing a message and you don't need queues then I think Redis is also a good option.
If you however can not afford losing a message then Redis is not a good option.
I am putting together a queue based distributed system, all standard stuff. We are using the latest version of RabbitMQ to provide our messaging transport tier.
I have some questions regarding achieving high availability (for my applications and not actually RabbitMQ) that I couldn't answer by reading the documentation. Would appreciate some advice, it's very likely my lack of understanding of Rabbit/AMQP that is causing the problem :)
Problem: I have a message producer (called the primary). There is one and only 1 message producer. There is a secondary producer (called the backup) which should take over from the primary should it fail.
How could I achieve this using existing RabbitMQ capabilities?
Thoughts: Use an "exclusive" queue, to which the primary will be connected to. The backup will attempt to connect to to this queue. When the primary fails, the backup will gain connectivity to the queue and establish control over the process.
What is the correct pattern I should be using to achieve this? I couldn't find any documentation on competing producers etc, would appreciate your advice! How do others do this?
Kind regards
TM
If you want to have only one producer at a time - you can't afford it with RabbitMQ mechanism (unless you'll get some plugin but I don't know such of a kind). You can gain control on producers number on application level.
P.S.:
Looks like you don't get AMQP idea well, producers publish messages to exchanges, while consuming get them from queue. The broker (RabbitMQ) route messages from exchange to on or more queues (in fact, it can also route messages to other exchange, but that's another story).
I am a newbie to real-time application development and am trying to wrap my head around the myriad options out there. I have read as many blog posts, notes and essays out there that people have been kind enough to share. Yet, a simple problem seems unanswered in my tiny brain. I thought a number of other people might have the same issues, so I might as well sign up and post here on SO. Here goes:
I am building a tiny real-time app which is asynchronous chat + another fun feature. I boiled my choices down to the following two options:
LAMP + RabbitMQ
Node.JS + Redis + Pub-Sub
I believe that I get the basics to start learning and building this out. However, my (seriously n00b) questions are:
How do I communicate with the end-user -> Client to/from Server in both of those? Would that be simple Javascript long/infinite polling?
Of the two, which might more efficient to build out and manage from a single Slice (assuming 100 - 1,000 users)?
Should I just build everything out with jQuery in the 'old school' paradigm and then identify which stack might make more sense? Just so that I can get the product fleshed out as a prototype and then 'optimize' it. Or is writing in one over the other more than mere optimization? ( I feel so, but I am not 100% on this personally )
I hope this isn't a crazy question and won't get flamed right away. Would love some constructive feedback, love this community!
Thank you.
Architecturally, both of your choices are the same as storing data in an Oracle database server for another application to retrieve.
Both the RabbitMQ and the Redis solution require your apps to connect to an intermediary server that handles the data communications. Redis is most like Oracle, because it can be used simply as a persistent database with a network API. But RabbitMQ is a little different because the MQ Broker is not really responsible for persisting data. If you configure it right and use the right options when publishing a message, then RabbitMQ will actually persist the data for you but you can't get the data out except as part of the normal message queueing process. In other words, RabbitMQ is for communicating messages and only offers persistence as a way of recovering from network problems or system crashes.
I would suggest using RabbitMQ and whatever programming languages you are already familiar with. Since the M in LAMP is usually interpreted as MySQL, this means that you would either not use MySQL at all, or only use it for long term storage of data, not for the realtime communications.
The RabbitMQ site has a huge amount of documentation about building apps with AMQP. I suggest that after you install RabbitMQ, you read through the docs for rabbitmqctl and then create a vhost to experiment in. That way it is easy to clean up your experiments without resetting everything. I also suggest using only topic exchanges because you can emulate the behavior of direct and fanout exchanges by using wildcards in the routing_key.
Remember, you only publish messages to exchanges, and you only receive messages from queues. The exchange is responsible for pattern matching the message's routing_key to the queue's binding_key to determine which queues should receive a copy of the message. It is worthwhile learning the whole AMQP model even if you only plan to send messages to one queue with the same name as the routing_key.
If you are building your client in the browser, and you want to build a prototype, then you should consider just using XHR today, and then move to something like Kamaloka-js which is a pure Javascript implementation of AMQP (the AMQ Protocol) which is the standard protocol used to communicate to a RabbitMQ message broker. In other words, build it with what you know today, and then speed it up later which something (AMQP) that has a long term future in your toolbox.
Should I just build everything out with jQuery in the 'old school' paradigm and then identify which stack might make more sense? Just so that I can get the product fleshed out as a prototype and then 'optimize' it. Or is writing in one over the other more than mere optimization? ( I feel so, but I am not 100% on this personally )
This is usually called RAD (rapid application design/development) and it is what I would recommend right now. This lets you build the proof of concept that you can use to work off of later to get what you want to happen.
As for how to talk to the clients from the server, and vice versa, have you read at all on websockets?
Given the choice between LAMP or event based programming, for what you're suggesting, I would tell you to go with the event based programming, so nodejs. But that's just one man's opinion.
Well,
LAMP - Apache create new process for every request. RabbitMQ can be useful with many features.
Node.js - Uses single process to handle all request asynchronously with help of event looping. So, no extra overhead process creation like apache.
For asynchronous chat application,
socket.io + Node.js + redis pub-sup is best stack.
I have already implemented real-time notification using above stack.
On my team at work, we use the IBM MQ technology a lot for cross-application communication. I've seen lately on Hacker News and other places about other MQ technologies like RabbitMQ. I have a basic understanding of what it is (a commonly checked area to put and get messages), but what I want to know what exactly is it good at? How will I know where I want to use it and when? Why not just stick with more rudimentary forms of interprocess messaging?
All the explanations so far are accurate and to the point - but might be missing something: one of the main benefits of message queueing: resilience.
Imagine this: you need to communicate with two or three other systems. A common approach these days will be web services which is fine if you need an answers right away.
However: web services can be down and not available - what do you do then? Putting your message into a message queue (which has a component on your machine/server, too) typically will work in this scenario - your message just doesn't get delivered and thus processed right now - but it will later on, when the other side of the service comes back online.
So in many cases, using message queues to connect disparate systems is a more reliable, more robust way of sending messages back and forth. It doesn't work well for everything (if you want to know the current stock price for MSFT, putting that request into a queue might not be the best of ideas) - but in lots of cases, like putting an order into your supplier's message queue, it works really well and can help ease some of the reliability issues with other technologies.
MQ stands for messaging queue.
It's an abstraction layer that allows multiple processes (likely on different machines) to communicate via various models (e.g., point-to-point, publish subscribe, etc.). Depending on the implementation, it can be configured for things like guaranteed reliability, error reporting, security, discovery, performance, etc.
You can do all this manually with sockets, but it's very difficult.
For example: Suppose you want to processes to communicate, but one of them can die in the middle and later get reconnected. How would you ensure that interim messages were not lost? MQ solutions can do that for you.
Message queueuing systems are supposed to give you several bonuses. Among most important ones are monitoring and transactional behavior.
Transactional design is important if you want to be immune to failures, such as power failure. Imagine that you want to notify a bank system of ATM money withdrawal, and it has to be done exactly once per request, no matter what servers failed temporarily in the middle. MQ systems would allow you to coordinate transactions across multiple database, MQ and other systems.
Needless to say, such systems are very slow compared to named pipes, TCP or other non-transactional tools. If high performance is required, you would not allow your messages to be written thru disk. Instead, it will complicate your design - to achieve exotic reliable AND fast communication, which pushes the designer into really non-trivial tricks.
MQ systems normally allow users to watch the queue contents, write plugins, clear queus, etc.
MQ simply stands for Message Queue.
You would use one when you need to reliably send a inter-process/cross-platform/cross-application message that isn't time dependent.
The Message Queue receives the message, places it in the proper queue, and waits for the application to retrieve the message when ready.
reference: web services can be down and not available - what do you do then?
As an extension to that; what if your local network and your local pc is down as well?? While you wait for the system to recover the dependent deployed systems elsewhere waiting for that data needs to see an alternative data stream.
Otherwise, that might not be good enough 'real time' response for today's and very soon in the future Internet of Things (IOT) requirements.
if you want true parallel, non volatile storage of various FIFO streams(at least at some point along the signal chain) use an FPGA and FRAM memory. FRAM runs at clock speed and FPGA devices can be reprogrammed on the fly adding and taking away however many independent parallel data streams are needed(within established constraints of course).