ActiveMQ Mirrored Queues on separate brokers - replication

Is it possible to set up mirrored queues on different broker instances, residing on different machines? If so, how?
If not, what component(s) might I need to subclass/override to do something homegrown?

Not really sure whay your incentive is for this setup.
If you have multiple brokers in a network, you can't really tell which machine a certain message is on (since it's forwarded to the broker where there is a connected consumer).
If all you need is wiretapping to a totally different ActiveMQ server, you can use Apache Camel for that (it's included in ActiveMQ).
You just need to configure a connector to each ActiveMQ instance.
Actually, in a response to another question, I wrote a small Camel route that copies messages from every queue starting with FOO. to another queue with the name COPY.<queue name>. It might be useful in this case too.

Related

How to send messages to specialised node in a cluster rabbitmq

I have a cluster of rabbitmq servers. But the machines where the servers are hosted show differences in terms of installed software. So, they have no overlapping capabilities, they are specialized workers, for example, only one node has email software installed.
I know that a queue is bound to the node on which is created. My question is, how I can set up my queues so I can send certain messages to the special endowed node, where my special software is waiting for work, bypassing rabbitmq distributing messages round-robin algorithm.
Maybe that is not a solution, am open to any working solution
You could always connect to the IP address of the specific node in the cluster, rather than connecting to some kind of a load balancer that is in front of the cluster - so specify a different IP in the client's method for opening the connection. This of course defeats the purpose of the cluster, but it seems to me that your setup does the same thing :)
By rabbitmq server do you mean actual rabbitmq server or clients/workers?
If I understand correctly, you can create a single exchange of type "topic". For each worker create an exclusive queue and bind it to the exchange with some unique routing key which in your case will be the feature of the host. When submitting a message to the exchange, use the feature as a routing key. The message will be routed to the appropriate host.

rabbitMQ federation VS ActiveMQ Master/Slave

I am trying to set up cluster of brokers, which should have same feature like rabbitMQ cluster, but over WAN (my machines are in different locations), so rabbitMQ cluster does not work.
I am looking to alternatives, rabbitMQ federation is just backup the messages in the downstream, can not make sure they have exactly the same messages available at any time (downstream still keeps the old messages already consumed in the upstream)
how about ActiveMQ Master/Slave, I have found :
http://activemq.apache.org/how-do-distributed-queues-work.html
"queues and topics are all replicated between each broker in the cluster (so often to a master and maybe a single slave). So each broker in the cluster has exactly the same messages available at any time so if a master fails, clients failover to a slave and you don't loose a message."
My concern is that if it can automatically update to make sure Master/Slave always have the same messages, which means the consumed messages in Master will also disappear in Slaves.
Thanks :)
ActiveMQ has various clustering features.
First there is High Availability - "Master/Slave". The idea is that several physical servers act as a single logical ActiveMQ broker. If one goes down, another takes it place without losing data. You can do that by sharing the message store (shared file system or shared JDBC), or you could setup a replicated cluster, which replicates read/writes to the master down to all slaves (you need three+ servers). ActiveMQ is using LevelDB and Apache Zookeeper to achieve this.
The other format of cluster available in ActiveMQ is to be able to distribute load and separate security over several logical brokers. Brokers are then connected in a network of brokers. Messages are by default passed around to the broker with available consumers for that message. However, there is a rich toolbox of features in ActiveMQ to tweak a network of brokers to do things as always send a copy of a message to specific broker etc. It takes some messing with the more advanced features though (static network connectors and queue mirroring, maybe more).
Maybe there is a better way to solve your requirements, which is not really specified in the question?

When to use RabbitMQ shovels and when Federation plugin?

For the company I work for we would like to use RabbitMQ as our main message bus. The idea we have is that every single application uses their own vhost for internal communication and that via the shovel or federation plugin we would make it possible to share certain type of the events across multiple vhosts (maybe even multiple machines (non-clustered)).
We chose for application per vhost to separate internal communication from public events and to keep the security adjustable per application.
Based on the information published on the RabbitMQ website I don't get it when I have to choose for shovels or when I have to choose for the federation plugin.
RabbitMQ has the following explanation when to use what:
Typically you would use the shovel to link brokers across the internet when you need more control than federation provides.
What is the fine grain control in shovels which I am missing when I choose for federation?
At this moment I think I would prefer the federation plugin because I could automate the inter-vhost-communication via the REST API provided by the federation plugin.
In case of shovels I would need to change the shovel configuration and reboot the RabbitMQ instance every time we would like to share an event between vhosts. Are my thoughts correct about this?
We are currently running RMQ on Windows with clients connecting from .NET. In the near future Java/Perl/PHP clients will join.
To summarize my questions:
What is the fine grain control in shovels which I am missing when I
choose for federation?
Is it correct that the only way to change the
inter-vhost-communication when I use shovels is by changing theconfig file and rebooting the instance?
Does the setup (vhost per application) make sense or am I missing the point completely?
Shovels and queue provide different means to be forward messages from one RabbitMQ node to another.
Federated Exchange
With a federated exchange, queues can be connected to the queue on the upstream(source) node. In addition, an exchange on the downstream(destination) node will receive a copy of messages that are published to the upstream node.
Federated exchanges are a similar to exchange-to-exchange bindings, in that, they can (optionally) subscribe to a limited set of messages from an upstream exchange.
Federated Queue
(NOTE: These are new in RabbitMQ 3.2.x)
With a federated queue, consumers can be connected to the queue on both the upstream(source) and downstream(destination) nodes.
In essence the downstream queue is a consumer on the upstream queue, with the expectation that there will be additional downstream consumers that process the messages in the same manner as a consumer attached to the upstream queue.
Any messages consumed by the downstream (federated) queue will not be available for consumers on the upstream queue.
Use Case:
If consumers are being migrated from one node to another, a federated queue will allow this to happen without messages being missed, or processed twice.
Use Case: from the RabbitMQ docs
The typical use would be to have the same "logical" queue distributed
over many brokers. Each broker would declare a federated queue with
all the other federated queues upstream. (The links would form a
complete bi-directional graph on n queues.)
Shovel
Shovels on the other hand, attach an "upstream" queue to a "downstream" exchange. (I place the terms in quotes because the shovel documentation does not describe the nodes with the same semantics as the federation documentation.)
The shovel consumes the messages from the queue and sends them to the exchange on the destination node. (NOTE: While not normally discussed as part of this the pattern, there is nothing stopping a consumer from connecting to the queue on the origin node.)
To answer the specific questions:
What is the fine grain control in shovels which I am missing when I
choose for federation?
A shovel does not have to reside on an "upstream" or "downstream" node. It can be configured and operate from an independent node.
A shovel can create all of the elements of the linkage by itself: the source queue, the bindings of the queue, and the destination exchange. Thus, it is non-invasive to either the source or destination node.
Is it correct that the only way to change the
inter-vhost-communication when I use shovels is by changing theconfig
file and rebooting the instance?
This has generally been the accepted downside of the shovel.
With the following command (caveat: only tested on RabbitMQ 3.1.x, and with a very specific rabbitmq.config file that only contain ) you can reload a shovel configuration from the specified file. (in this case /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.config)
rabbitmqctl eval 'application:stop(rabbitmq_shovel), {ok, [[{rabbit, _}|[{rabbitmq_shovel, [{shovels, Shovels}] }]]]} = file:consult("/etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.config"), application:set_env(rabbitmq_shovel, shovels, Shovels), application:start(rabbitmq_shovel).'
.
Does the setup (vhost per application) make sense or am I missing the
point completely?
This decision is going to depend on your use case. vhosts primarily provide logical (and access) separation between queues/exchanges and authorized users.
Shovel acts like a well-designed built-in consumer. It can consume messages from a source broker and queue, and publish them into a destination broker and exchange. You could write an application to do that, but shovel already got it right - if all you need is to move messages from a queue to an exchange in the same or another broker, shovel can do it for you. Just as a well-behaving app, it can declare exchanges/queues/bindings, reconnect, change the routing key etc. You can set it up on the source or on the destination broker, or even use a third broker. It's basically an AMQP client.
Federation, on the other hand is used to connect your broker to one or multiple upstream brokers, or you can even create chains of brokers, bending the topology any way you like. You can federate exchanges or queues, and e.g. distribute messages to multiple brokers without the need to bind additional queues to a topic exchange or using a fanout exchange, and shoveling messages from each queue to a downstream broker.
To recap, federation operates at a higher level, while shovel is mostly "just" a well-written client.
To reconfigure shovel, you have to restart the broker, unfortunately.
I don't think you really need a per app vhost. You can add a per-app user to the broker without separate vhosts. Not sure what you mean on "share an event between vhosts", though.

Using Apache Camel for Load Balancing

Can I access SEDA or VM queue from another machine or JVM?
I actually want to implement load balancing with the help of Camel but do not want introduce another messaging framework for this. I just want to distribute load to different consumers from a producers using some in built queue.
Is it possible? If no then what are my options?
Another Approach:(Pull Approach)
Not sure how optimum new approach is or what are the advantages and disadvantages of new approach, So please help me to analyze this approach.
Messages will be put into a Master queue and all the worker systems will be listening to Master queue.Let's say 100,000 messages are being put into Master queue and 5 worker systems are listening to it. Worker systems will process the messages one by one from the master queue. There are two big benefits with this approach:
I don't need to worry about registering my worker systems with the producer. Sixth system just boot up and start listening to Master queue.
I don't need to worry about sending message to a consumer system which is free. When worker system will be done processing a message, it pick up another one from the Master queue.
Let me know your thoughts on it.
SEDA and VM:// work only on the same JVM.
Load balancing in Java messaging is usually achieved using the JMS and Competing Consumers pattern. You send messages to the queue and multiple consumers compete to process them.
If broker with its queue becomes a bottleneck - consider using fan-out pattern and the network of brokers.
SEDA and VM endpoints are valid for the host Context and JVM respectively. To facilitate JVM-to-JVM messaging you will need to use an over-the-wire protocol component such as, but not limited to, Mina, HTTP or JMS.
The easiest way is to use jms. If you have n routes listening on the same jms queue then they will automatically load balance. If one goes away the load will be balanced over the remaining ones. I recommend starting with ActiveMQ as it is very easy to setup and well integrated with Camel.To make the broker highly available you can either setup two standalone brokers or setup one embedded broker per camel instance.

ActiveMQ - network of multiple brokers configuration

I'm trying to set up three brokers in a network for load balancing -- clients and producers can connect to any of these brokers.
Questions:
What is the recommended topology to use to network these brokers? More specifically, what is the networkConnector configuration to use on each of these brokers? should duplex setting be enabled? (I guess duplex setting depends on the topology we choose)
A->B->C->A or A<-->B<-->C<-->A
Client should use failover protocol to connect to these brokers, right? e.g. failover://(tcp://b1:6161, tcp://b2:6161, tcp://b3:6161)
Any duplicate message handling required on the client side in case of restarts? See http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?108461-Failover-issue-in-ActiveMQ -- not clear why duplicate message issue exists here
Ideally we want to set up topology as shown in this post http://edelsonmedia.com/?p=143 -- not clear how to set up networkConnector on masters and slaves.
1.) I can't actually recommend a topology. This choice depends on the number of hops (between the broker where the messages enters the cluster and the broker where the consumer conects to) you can accept. In a heave traffic scenario every hop adds to the network load.
In my company we use a hypercube network (every broker knows every other broaker) and it works great.
Generaly you should make sure that your node configurations are as similar as possible. Using duplex makes sure you have less connections to configure (since the connection from B to A is already part of the duplex connection from A to B) but it introduce a large number of differences into your config file.
Personaly i created my own start script for ActiveMQ that auto-generated the connection config based on the dns names of my cluster (mycluster-01 to 06).
2.) yes. You might want to add ?randomize=false if you want to make sure the client uses the first entry in the list.
3.) Duplicate entries can happen if there are failures during message transport or as race conditions during heavy load. In general one message only is owned by one broker.
4.) dont set up network connectors between masters and slaves (REALLY DONT). Use the pure Master Slave feature of activeMQ and configure the master for each slave (you don't have to configure anything on the masters). For the all Masters configure NetworkConnections to the other Masters with failover to their slaves)
http://activemq.apache.org/pure-master-slave.html