What is the need for direct and fanout exchanges? - rabbitmq

As per my understanding, all the functionality or use-cases of direct and fanout exchanges can be achieved using topic exchange. Topic exchange supports superset of functionality. So the question is, why does RabbitMQ have direct and fanout exchanges? Are there any use-cases that can be achieved using direct/fanout exchange but not with topic exchange?

I would say it's a matter of simplification. If all you need is, say, a topology where each specific routing key maps 1:1 with a queue (round robin distribution of tasks between multiple workers within the same application is an example cited in the RabbitMQ doc), then Direct exchanges may be easier to use and work with, and all you need. That's not to say you couldn't accomplish the same thing using Topic Exchanges (you could).
Similarly, with Fanout exchanges, if you have a situation that calls for the simply broadcasting of messages, you may find a Fanout exchange is easier to work with. Again, that's not to say you couldn't accomplish the same thing using Topic Exchanges (you could).
I generally use Topic exchanges exclusively, because I value the flexibility they provide. As an application expands, they can handle a greater variety of use cases within the same exchange, whereas that may not be the case with the other two types. Thus I can avoid the potential for having to change the topology midstream as an application grows.
As the RabbitMQ doc states about Topic exchanges:
Topic exchanges have a very broad set of use cases. Whenever a problem
involves multiple consumers/applications that selectively choose which
type of messages they want to receive, the use of topic exchanges
should be considered.
For more information about these concepts, including illustrations, this page has quite a bit of info:
https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/amqp-concepts.html

You could replace the functionality of direct and fanout with a topic exchange, but you could also implement a big "Animal" class and don't bother implementing the "cat" and "dog" ones…
The different exchange types offer specificity according to your needs. You could do broadcast with the topic exchange, but then you need to force every client to know about the meaning of # and require them to use that routing key when binding; or just use a fanout exchange.
On the implementation side, implementing a topic exchange is a bit more complex, require a data structure that asks for more book-keeping than a plain fanout or direct exchange.

Related

When to use Which Exchange in RabbitMQ?

I have read so many articles regarding exchanges in RabbitMQ.
But I couldn't find any useful article which explains about usecases of each exchange.
all they are saying is
Direct Exchange - Binding key and routing key should be same.
Topic Exchange - Routing key should match the routing pattern of the binding key.
Fanout Exchange - All the queues which are bounds to that particular exchange will get the message.
Header Exchange - headers should match the key.
can any one explain each exchange and usecases of it in detail?
Well, the choice of exchange type to use is pretty much driven by your use case, it your responsibility to choose the exchange type that suits you best.
Here are some examples:
Lets say you want a broadcast (you have multiple instances of the applications that are supposed to receive the message). For example, something happens in the system (resource becomes available, cache should be invalidated, you name it) and you want that all instances will know it. Then your first bet will be using fanout exchange.
Another example. You want to unicast: send a message and you have multiple consumers, but you want that only one consumer will get a message and will attempt to process it. In this case, you can't use fan-out exchange and you'll opt for other types of exchange (like direct exchange for example).
All-in-all I believe you should be interested to read this article that describes various concepts of fairly rich amqp protocol and provides use case examples for different types of exchanges.

How to handle dynamic routing logic for consumers in rabbitmq?

I have a use-case where the producers publish some events and the consumers are initially bound to the producers' exchanges. Over time, certain conditions change and the binding or the routing keys (for consumers) needs to be updated, since their subscription interests have changed. Can I handle this dynamic routing scenario in RabbitMQ?
Yes, this is fairly straightforward.
RabbitMQ provides the Queue.Bind and Queue.Unbind methods. When your consumers wish to receive information about a particular topic, they would Bind the queue to that topic via a topic exchange. When they are no longer interested in a particular topic, the binding would be removed for that topic using Unbind.

In RabbitMQ which is more expensive, multiple queues per exchange, or multiple exchanges and less queues per each?

So we decided to go with RabbitMQ as a message/event bus in our migration to micro-services architecture, but we couldn't find a definite answer on what is the best way of putting our queues, we have two options to go with:
One main exchange which will be a Fanout exchange, which in turn will fan messages out to a main queue for logging and other purposes and another sub exchange which will be a topic exchange and route the messages to each desired queue using the message routing key. We expect the number of queues behind the sub-exchange to be some how a large number. This can be explained by this graph:
One main exchange, which will be a Topic exchange, with still one main queue bound to that exchange using "#" routing key. That main exchange will also handles main routing to other sub exchanges, so routing keys might be "agreements.#", "assignments.#", "messages.#", which are then used to bind multiple topic sub-exchanges, each will handle sub routing, so one sub exchange might be handling all "assignments" and queues bound to that exchange could be bound by routing keys like "assignments.accepted", "assignments.deleted"...In this scenario, we feel like the huge number of queues will be less per exchange, they will be somehow distributed between exchanges.
So, which of these scenarios could be the best approach? Faster on RabbitMQ, less overhead.
Taking in mind, all queues, exchanges and bindings will be done on the fly from the service which will be either publishing or subscribing.
You can find some explanation in this topic: RabbitMQ Topic exchanges: 1 Exchange vs Many Exchanges
I am using RabbitMQ in a very similar way that you showed in the case 2, as I found the same benefits as described in this article: https://skillachie.com/2014/06/27/rabbitmq-exchange-to-exchange-bindings-ampq/
Exchange-to-exchange bindings are much more flexible in terms of the topology that you can design, promotes decoupling & reduce binding churn
Exchange-to-exchange bindings are said to be very light weight and as a result help to increase performance *
Based in my own experience with exchange-to-exchange, the case 2 is great and it will allows to create/change messages flow topologies in a very fast way.
I'm going to first re-summarize what I think is your question, since I'm sure it's buried somewhere in your post.
It is desirable to have a tracer/logging queue, in addition to a series of work-specific queues for actual message processing. What exchange topology is best for this scenario?
First off, neither option makes much sense given your application. Option 1 will create an exchange that will publish a message to every queue bound to it, regardless. This is clearly not what you want. Option 2 will give you a rather complex routing topology for which the benefit is unclear, and the drawback is painful maintenance and a steep learning curve. (Just because you can do something does not mean you should do it.)
What should be done?
It is important to remember that in RabbitMQ, it is the queues which consume the resources of the broker. Exchanges merely connect queues with publishers. The exchange is a means to an end, while the queue is the end itself.
What instead I think you should do is set up a single topic exchange. Bind your tracing queue to routing key # so that you receive all messages. Then, bind your work queues appropriately so that they receive only the messages that need to flow into them. For example, it is common to route messages by message type, where each queue holds exactly one type of message. This is both simple and effective.
The advantage of a single topic exchange is that you get the benefits of both a Direct Exchange and a Fanout Exchange depending on the binding key used. Further, configuration changes are easy to achieve and can often be done without disrupting any system processing at all (let's say that you want to stop tracing certain messages - this can be done with ease using a topic exchange, assuming your routing keys are rational).
Exchange-to-exchange bindings is semantically identical to exchange-to-queue bindings.
https://www.rabbitmq.com/e2e.html

Is it possible to define a "random" rabbitmq queue binding?

I'm envisioning a configuration in which one exchange is bound to several queues. Each of these bindings will be unique and thus targeted at particular messages. However, some, and perhaps most of the time I'd like the incoming messages to be randomly distributed among the queues. My current thought is to simply have the publisher choose the routing key at random from among the choices. That, however, requires the publisher to have some knowledge of the sort of bindings that are available. It would be better if the random selection were made at the exchange level.
Is it possible to specify a routing key such that the exchange will make a random choice from among the available queue bindings?
thanks
It is possible to define own exchange types for RabbitMQ. Thus you can build an exchange, which exactly fits your needs.
RabbitMQ Random Exchange seems to have the behavior you request. However, I have no experience with it.

RabbitMQ fan out on a topic exchange

Pretty new to RabbitMQ and we're still in the investigation stage to see if it's a good fit for our use cases--
We've readily come to the conclusion that our desired topology would have us deploying a few topic based exchanges, and then filtering from there to specific queues. For example, let's say we have a user and an upload exchange, where the user queue might receive messages where the topic is "new-registration" or "friend-request" and the upload exchange might receive messages like "video-upload" or "picture-upload".
Creating the queues, getting them routed to the appropriate queue, and then building listeners to handle the messages for the various queues has been quite straight forward.
What's unclear to me however is if it's possible to do a fanout on a topic exchange?
I.e. I have named queues that are bound to my topic exchange, but I'd like to be able to just throw tons of instances of my listeners at those queues to prevent single points of failure. But to the best of my knowledge, RabbitMQ treats these listeners in a straight forward round robin fashion--e.g. every Nth message always go to the same Nth listener rather than dispatching messages to the first available consumer. This is generally acceptable to us but given the load we anticipate, we'd like to avoid the possibility of hot spots developing amongst our consumer farm.
So, is there some way, either in the queue or exchange configuration or in the consumer code, where we can point our listeners to a topic queue but have the listeners treated in a fanout fashion?
Yes, by having the listeners bind using different queue names, they will be treated in a fanout fashion.
Fanout is 1:N though, i.e. each task can be delivered to multiple listeners like pub-sub. Note that this isn't restricted to a fanout exchange, but also applies if you bind multiple queues to a direct or topic exchange with the same binding key. (Installing the management plugin and looking at the exchanges there may be useful to visualize the bindings in effect.)
Your current setup is a task queue. Each task/message is delivered to exactly one worker/listener. Throw more listeners at the same queue name, and they will process the tasks round-robin as you say. With "fanout" (separate queues for a topic) you will process a task multiple times.
Depending on your platform there may be existing work queue solutions that meet your requirements, such as Resque or DelayedJob for Ruby, Celery for Python or perhaps Octobot or Akka for the JVM.
I don't know for a fact, but I strongly suspect that RabbitMQ will skip consumers with unacknowledged messages, so it should never bottleneck on a single stuck consumer. The comments on their FAQ seem to suggest that RabbitMQ will make an effort to keep things chugging along even in the presence of troublesome consumers.
This is a late answer, but in case others come across this question...
It sounds like what you want is fair dispatch rather than a fan out model (which would publish a given message to every queue).
Fair dispatch will give a message to the next available worker rather than using a simple round-robin approach. This should avoid the "hotspots" you are concerned about, without delivering the same message to multiple consumers.
If this is what you are looking for, then see the "Fair Dispatch" section on this page in the Rabbit docs. A prefetch count of 1 is the key here.