A newbie question : If I am not using Sagas or pub/sub model, do I need any persistence layer with NServiceBus?
The default persistence is RavenDB, I was wondering if I just use NSB without RavenDB or any persistence layer?
Side note:
Currently I have to run RavenDBServer.exe before I can even play around with NserviceBus, so if I do start using NServiceBus, I don't want to have a dependency on another app running in production. This could be a issue with my install.
NServiceBus only uses persistence for storing subscriptions for pub/sub and for saga state. If you aren't using those then you don't need RavenDB or any other implementation. I believe the NServiceBus.Core binary by default comes bundled with RavenDB DLLs, but it won't be needed in production in your case.
If I understand correctly, you could also use the NServiceBus.Lite profile which I believe uses in memory persistence. This is a great way to go as you are developing and trying to learn NServiceBus. However, I'm not sure you'd want to do so in production. It would be a better practice to have some persistence either in a database or file system to ensure reliability of your application in the case of errors or application restarts.
Related
I am in a situation where I can use Service Fabric (locally) but cannot leverage Azure Service Bus (or anything "cloud"). What would be the corollary for queuing/pub-sub? Service Fabric is allowed since it is able to run in a local container, and is "free". Other 3rd party messaging infrastructure, like RabbitMQ, are also off the table (at the moment).
I've built systems using a locally grown bus, built on MSMQ and WCF, but I don't see how to accomplish the same thing in SF. I suspect I can have SF services use a custom ICommunicationListener that exposes msmq, but that would only be available inside the cluster (the way I understand it). I can build an HTTPBridge (in SF) in front of those to make them available outside the cluster, but then I'd lose the lifetime decoupling (client being able to call a service, using queues, even if that service isn't online at the time) since the bridge itself wouldn't benefit from any of the aspects of queuing.
I have a few possibilities but all suffer from some malady that only exists because of SF, locally. Also, the same code needs to easily deploy to full Azure SF (where I can use ASB and this issue disappears) so I don't want to build two separate systems just because of where I am hosting it in some instances.
Thanks for any tips.
You can build this yourself, for example like this. This uses a BrokerService that will distribute message-data to subscribed services and actors.
You can also run a containerized queuing platform like RabbitMQ with volumes.
By running the queue system inside the cluster you won't introduce an external dependency.
The problem is not SF, The main issue with your design is that you are coupling architectural requirements to implementations. SF runs on top of VirtualMachines, in the end, the only difference is that SF put the services in those machines, using another solution you would have an Agent Deploying these services in there or doing a Manual deployment. The challenges are the same.
It is clear from the description that the requirement in your design is a need for a message queue, the concept of queues are the same does not matter if it is Service Bus, RabbitMQ or MSMQ. Each of then will have the basic foundations of queues with specifics of each implementation, some might add transactions, some might implement multiple patterns, and so on.
If you design based on specific implementation, you will couple your solution to the implementation and make your solution hard to maintain and face challenges like you described.
Solutions like NServiceBus and Masstransit reduce a lot of these coupling from your code, and if you think these are not enough, you can create your own abstraction. Then you use configurations to tied your business logic to implementations.
Despite the above advice, I would not recommend you using different
solutions per environment, because as said previously, each solution
has it's own implementations and they might not assimilate to each other, as example, you might face issues in
production because you developed against MSMQ on DEV and TEST
environments, and when deployed to Production you use ServiceBus, they
have different limitations, like message size, retention period and son
on.
If you are willing to use MSMQ, you can add MSMQ to the VMs running your cluster and connect from your services without any issue. Take a look into this SO first: How can I use MSMQ in Azure Service Fabric
I would like to know are there feature wise same or different? Could you also mention any pros and cons about both of these? Also please mention real-world use case for both Embedded BrokerService vs installed ActiveMQ broker. Thanks in advance!
ActiveMQ is just a Java application, and the embedded version offers essentially the same features as the stand-alone version. In fact, you can configure an embedded broker to take its configuration from an XML file, in which case it will look very similar to the stand-alone broker.
Embedding a broker is a reasonable thing to do if you need the benefit of programmatic configuration; that is, you want to configure things according to rules which are hard to implement in an XML file. It also makes sense if you want close-coupled operation between the broker and the application components, with message data being passed in memory. This might be the situation if you're using JMS as an inter-module communication mechanism within the application.
Embedding a broker has the disadvantage -- and it can be a profound one -- of making it difficult to disentangle problems in the broker from problems in your application. Figuring out the cause of, say, runaway memory consumption could be very difficult. You can get commercial support for ActiveMQ, should you need it, but it will be hard for any commercial organization to support a hybrid broker+application installation.
This would be my first time using ActiveMQ (instead of the out-of-the-box OpenMQ in GF) and I am trying to determine which approach is better in terms of scaling and maintaining an ActiveMQ environment. We do have experience in setting up and maintaining Glassfish clusters and deploy applications to it. But we are contemplating on what approach is better as we don't want to go down a rabbit hole that we can't get out of because we built environments around it and seeing towards the end that the infrastructure we had setup wouldn't scale.
Has anybody tried using both approaches? Even if anybody implemented one of the approaches with Glassfish, telling us their experience (gains and pains) would be very helpful and appreciated.
For 99% of cases, it's usually better to deploy a standalone broker - this way you're treating your messaging as just another layer of the infrastructure, much like a database. When a broker is standalone, you can set it up as highly available, upgrade it at will without modifying your applications (a broker can be upgraded without upgrading the client libraries), and can scale it out as appropriate later on if you need to (most projects don't).
I have seen people deploy brokers as embedded, with a convoluted network of brokers to get all the boxes in a cluster talking to each other. This usually ends in tears and reverting back to a separate master-slave pair of brokers. Which is all they needed all along.
I have an NServiceBus installation (a single server, obviously).
Is it possible to configure the NSB persistence to use a single RavenDB database (not server)?
If so, what would the configuration be?
The scenario I am thinking about is whether it is possible to use RavenHQ so that all my NSB data is backed up off the machine running the bus.
Just use the connectionstring option(NServiceBus.Persistence) and point all your endpoints to the same db. Be aware that you need to use NSB 3.2.3 since the TimeoutManager was patched to support this in that version
I am looking at using MSMQ as a solution to do asynchronous execution in my upcoming project. I want to know the differences between using WCF and frameworks like MassTransit or even hand written MSMQ client to place/read task off MSMQ.
Basically the application will be several websites (internal through LAN or external through the Internet) reading/writing data through a service layer (be it WCF or normal web service). Then this service layer will do one of two things: 1. write data to database 2. and/or trigger the background process by placing a message in the queue. 3. obviously it can also retrieve data from database. The little agent (a windows service) on the other side of the queue will monitor the queue and execute based on the task command.
This architecture will be quite easy to scale (add more queues and agents) and easy to implement compared to RPC or distributed execution or whatever. And the agent processing doesn’t need to be real time. And the agent and service layer are separate applications except they share the common domain objects and Repositories etc.
What do you think? Architecture suggestions for the above requirements are welcomed. Thank you!
WCF adds an abstraction over MSMQ. In fact, once you define compatible contracts (operations must be OneWay), you can switch out MSMQ in the config, transparently. (For instance, you could switch to normal HttpWS or a NetTcp binding.)
You should evaluate the other WCF benefits, like security and so on, to see how those fit in with your needs. Again, they should be reasonably transparent of the fact you're using MSMQ underneath. For instance, adding SOAP security and so on should "just work", independent of using MSMQ.
(Although, IIRC, you still need to login to the desktop on each machine that uses MSMQ, with the service account that will use MSMQ, to generate the certificate in the machines local profile. And then, it doesn't work very well from IIS6, since user profiles aren't loaded. A real pain in general, but nothing to do with WCF specifically.)
Apart from that:
Have you looked at SQL Server Service Broker? After using MSMQ + WCF and SSSB, I think that SSSB is vastly easier to configure and manage. SSSB works with T-SQL commands over any SQL client (I use it from Mono, on Linux, with transactions). It'll also give you transactional send/receive, even remotely (I think MSMQ 4 now allows this). It really takes a lot of the pain away from message queuing, and if you're using SQL Server already...
SSSB is often overlooked since the SQL Management Studio doesn't have GUI designers for it all, but it isn't hard and is a great option. The one downside is that if you want local send capability (i.e., queue message when network is down), you'll need to run a local SQL Express instance.
Your architecture seems sound and reasonable. However you should consider using the WCF net MSMQ transport over hand coded MSMQ classes. WCF wraps this common functionality into a nice programming model. Also I believe there is some improvements in the protocol used by wcf compared to basic System.Messaging
Have a look at the value-add over plain MSMQ:
http://readthedocs.org/docs/masstransit/en/latest/overview/valueadd.html
In summary, you get a lot of messaging concepts clearly presented in the API with MassTransit; to an extent you wouldn't have if you hand-coded it or used WCF.