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How to use RabbitMQ in service integration

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Re: How to use RabbitMQ in service integration

#11

Post by jpgvm »

RabbitMQ went on my "never again" list of things after dealing with it for years as part of OpenStack and projects before that. At the time there wasn't many viable alternatives to AMQP that were OSS and reasonable.

However many split brains and grey hairs later I decided RabbitMQ was almost never worth it regardless of how many of AMQPs advanced features you could make use of.

For the longest time I just made do with Kafka but this had serious deficiencies when implementing queues because of the cumulative ack only nature of Kafka.

Recently I have started using Pulsar which provides selective ack and all the best parts of AMQP without the complexity and unneeded parts. i.e it has things like scheduled delivery and TTLs in addition to the all important shared subscription which makes queues "just work" on top of streams.

If you want something like RabbitMQ but with a simpler API and are comfortable with JVM services give Pulsar a go. It's not for everyone but if you are already using a lot of the big data stack it's probably a good fit.

Re: How to use RabbitMQ in service integration

#12

Post by bironran »

jpgvm wrote: post #11

RabbitMQ went on my "never again" list of things after dealing with it for years as part of OpenStack and projects before that. At the time there wasn't many viable alternatives to AMQP that were OSS and reasonable. However many split brains and grey hairs later I decided RabbitMQ was almost never worth it regardless of how many of AMQPs advanced features you could make use of. For the longest time I just made do wit…

Can only echo parent. 3 places of work in varying sizes, 4 projects in varying maturity, not a single RMQ administration staff that was competent enough to reliably run the cluster.

Which of course leads me to believe the problem isn't with the people but with the ridiculously high threshold of knowledge, experience and app developer self-control needed to run RMQ successfully.

As parent said, many meltdowns later, I'm now firmly in the "No Rabbit!" camp. Redis pubsub/queues for immediate lossy delivery, kafka / gcp pubsub / aws sqs for less latency sensitive flows that require more consistency guarantees.

Re: How to use RabbitMQ in service integration

#13

Post by jayd16 »

jpgvm wrote: post #11

RabbitMQ went on my "never again" list of things after dealing with it for years as part of OpenStack and projects before that. At the time there wasn't many viable alternatives to AMQP that were OSS and reasonable. However many split brains and grey hairs later I decided RabbitMQ was almost never worth it regardless of how many of AMQPs advanced features you could make use of. For the longest time I just made do wit…

Hmm, what issues did you run into? I've used it on a few projects in a mirrored way and it was always fine. Is the clustering the issue?

Re: How to use RabbitMQ in service integration

#15

Post by Serow225 »

jpgvm wrote: post #11

RabbitMQ went on my "never again" list of things after dealing with it for years as part of OpenStack and projects before that. At the time there wasn't many viable alternatives to AMQP that were OSS and reasonable. However many split brains and grey hairs later I decided RabbitMQ was almost never worth it regardless of how many of AMQPs advanced features you could make use of. For the longest time I just made do wit…

I feel dumb saying it, but as someone whose had a lot of experience with messages buses (Rabbit and AMQP1.0), I've always struggled to understand what domains/situations Kafka is actually the best fit for. It's probably because of the areas that I work in which doesn't make it obvious, but I'd love to hear what exact scenarios it does actually make sense to use Kafka for instead of Rabbit or AMQP1.0 :)

RabbitMQ is one of those things that I've always found better to let the experts run (managed SaaS), unless your team is really wanting to take on the burden of becoming an Erlang distributed system debugger :)

Pulsar seems really interesting... There are now more managed Pulsar offerings coming online (StreamNative, DataStax who bought Kesque, Pandio, etc)

Re: How to use RabbitMQ in service integration

#16

Post by eternalban »

I've skimmed the comments here and of course the article. Some points based on experience with Kafka, RabbitMQ and exploratory (and ahead of hype cycle) look at Pulsar:

RabbitMQ is an excellent messaging middleware. But simply remember that it is not designed for optimal performance when holding on to data. "It is a river, not a lake". Performance is very sensitive to the amount of data that is in flight between send and receive end points.

Kafka is a "lake", but will not give you the rich routing and diverse semantics of Rabbit. If you are building 'event sourced' systems, Kafka and similar systems are a better choice.

Pulsar has a highly articulated architecture. It is built on Bookkeeper and decouples the persistent store servers from the client servicing servers. If you want to avoid the rebalancing pain of Kafka, Pulsar is the solution. However, Puslar has many more moving pieces.

Both RabbitMQ and Pulsar are authentic 'middle ware', and extensible. Kafka is, true to its genesis, a highly performant distributed log.

Durable, recoverable, and performant distributed messaging/journaling is inherently complex. Make sure you know what is it that you precisely require, and one of the above solutions will likely serve you well.

Re: How to use RabbitMQ in service integration

#17

Post by perlgeek »

At work, we've been using a RabbitMQ instance as a central integration point (for about 7ish years now, I believe), and it's been working very well so far.

My observations so far:

* Running a single RabbitMQ is pretty boring in the good sense.

* We haven't managed to switch to a cluster for HA yet; it seems that software that deals with RabbitMQ clusters must be cluster aware (consume from queues on all instances and the likes), and it wasn't worth our effort to fix all the applications.

* In the long run, the lack of tooling is hurting us. Want to do green-blue deployments? Canary deployments? When your services run on HTTP(S), there are simply tools for that. When your services consume from AMQP queues? You have to go searching for solutions, possibly build your own plumbing.

In the end, it turns out that we use publish/subscribe far less often that direct request/response patterns, so for new stuff I'd likely go with HTTPS instead of AMQP today.

Re: How to use RabbitMQ in service integration

#18

Post by reacharavindh »

jayd16 wrote: post #13
jpgvm wrote: post #11

RabbitMQ went on my "never again" list of things after dealing with it for years as part of OpenStack and projects before that. At the time there wasn't many viable alternatives to AMQP that were OSS and reasonable. However many split brains and grey hairs later I decided RabbitMQ was almost never worth it regardless of how many of AMQPs advanced features you could make use of. For the longest time I just made do wit…

Hmm, what issues did you run into? I've used it on a few projects in a mirrored way and it was always fine. Is the clustering the issue?

Not OP, but that is my experience. It worked like a rock on a single server. Clustering brought us issues rooting from its complexity. Split brain scenario, corruption of the Mnesia database and such. We went back to single server mode.

Re: How to use RabbitMQ in service integration

#19

Post by Plugawy »

reacharavindh wrote: post #18
jayd16 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, what issues did you run into? I've used it on a few projects in a mirrored way and it was always fine. Is the clustering the issue?

Not OP, but that is my experience. It worked like a rock on a single server. Clustering brought us issues rooting from its complexity. Split brain scenario, corruption of the Mnesia database and such. We went back to single server mode.

Same! Never bothered with the so-called HA setup after running a cluster for few months. Making all messages durable + backups of underlying storage are sufficient, while the do not prevent an outage, at least bringing the system back to an operational state is fairly straightforward

Re: How to use RabbitMQ in service integration

#20

Post by haswell »

pkb wrote: post #14

DON'T. RabbitMQ is fragile and breaks under low memory/high swap conditions. Usually due to epmd breaking. I know, have to fix it (usually by killing epmd) daily.

Is this a reason to not use it at all, or a reason to ensure the environment is properly tuned if you do use it?

Seems your conclusion “DON’T” implies the former, but this seems unnecessarily extreme.

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