10 ms·

Amazon Launches New RabbitMQ Message Broker Service

159 points by madebyherzblut 6y ago

object_Object 6y ago
Another bold innovative move from AWS.
- stock_toaster 6y ago
  To be honest, charging for things that other people have created and released for free _is_ pretty bold! ha
  - gotts 6y ago
    .. and not contributing back to the community and original authors
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Is it bold? If a group of people put something together and release the details for free, they have to expect others will profit off of it. This is the fate of all useful open source software that doesn't have some kind of no-commercial clause (which potentially moves it outside the ideals of open source as it restricts the use of the source code).
  - icedchai 6y ago
    Not really. This has been going on for decades. Examples: early web hosts running the LAMP stack: Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP. Eventually people put an admin UI on top (control panels, like Plesk and cPanel.) The core functionality is all free software. The value is not having to configure and manage all that stuff yourself.
  - rajamaka 6y ago
    You are still free to use the free open source version.
  - twelve40 6y ago
    There is absolutely nothing wrong with charging for this. Have you heard of "Wordpress hosting" for example?
FatDrunknStupid 6y ago
Semantically idiotic in my experience with the founder
throwaway7281 6y ago
From the FAANG, Amazon strikes me as the one using most open source code while at the same time not having much to show as open source - firecracker is a (relative) toy.
- rstupek 6y ago
  I'm curious why you'd characterize firecracker as a toy?
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    It’s (literally) Google’s crosvm with some changes. AWS forked an existing codebase, made some changes that mostly consisted of removing functionality to tailor the VMM for their use case, and then made a big PR push about “open sourcing” Firecracker as though it was a project they built from scratch. The announcement devoted 1 sentence to the fact that it’s a crosvm fork, and that’s not even the only thing covered in that one sentence. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...
    - whoevercares 6y ago
      Toy in what sense? It’s the backbone of most serverless offering from AWS.
      - dodobirdlord 6y ago
        Toy in the sense that it’s not a significant contribution to the open source community. Edit: In comparison to the scale of Amazon and the scale of contribution of other similarly-sized tech companies. Firecracker would rank as a more major contribution in my book if it wasn’t a cut-down fork of a pre-existing (and still active!) project.
        anaganisk 6y ago
        Define significant? If you're expecting every open source software user to push a million commits before they can be called "contributors" apart from Microsoft/Facebook I dont see any significant contributors.
slivanes 6y ago
Open source is free to do what you will, but how many PR's does AWS send back to origin?
- sg47 6y ago
  Usually zero.
- EwanToo 6y ago
  I don't know about Rabbit MQ, but for redis AWS sends back a lot, so much that one of their developers is now a core team member https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/ https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/
- NathanKP 6y ago
  Disclosure: I work at AWS and this is my personal opinion. I've seen growing levels of AWS contribution back to upstream projects over the past four years. Teams start out by operating a piece of software at scale, whether it is Redis, Kubernetes, etc. After they have operated it for a while they discover the bugs or performance issues, or customers of the service complain about something. At that point the team now has enough real world experience with that software to begin to contribute back to upstream. It takes time: to learn the ins and outs of the software well enough to know where and what improvements should be made, to understand the software's design and history well enough not to make bad suggestions or contributions that were already determined to be dead ends in the past, and to earn the approval of the community and existing maintainers enough to get significant contributions accepted in the first place.
  - wojack2dot0 6y ago
    Hey Thief, Which team you work on? Why would you cheer taking other people's work and defend the monetization? Do you publish PRs secretly pulling from public records, huh? You are not welcome here.
- pabs3 6y ago
  They have quite a number of commits from various authors to the Linux kernel at least: linux (master=) $ git shortlog -ns --author amazon 79 Arthur Kiyanovski 76 Gal Pressman 59 David Woodhouse 51 Sameeh Jubran 45 Netanel Belgazal 38 KarimAllah Ahmed 35 SeongJae Park 30 Jan H. Schönherr 26 Frank van der Linden 18 Andra Paraschiv 12 Paul Durrant 11 Talel Shenhar 10 Shay Agroskin ...
srameshc 6y ago
Will it force RabbitMQ to also change its open source license model like Redis ?
gauravphoenix 6y ago
I know a lot of HNers believe that AWS just consumes OSS and doesn't contribute back, I just wanted to share what AWS has to say about it- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/setting-the-record-straight-aws-open-source/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/setting-the-record-s... I am in no way defending or attacking anyone,I just want to provide a data point.
- OJFord 6y ago
  What a bizarre post! Seems really strange to me to see such a 'toys out of the pram' reaction piece like that from an organisation as big and corporate as AWS. That it feels the need to respond like that makes me see it in worse light over the matter rather than better.
bot41 6y ago
Cloud computing seems to be a winner take all scenario. For example, if you use AWS and need a message broker service then you'll use this. If you use Azure, you'll use their version. Development seems like just hooking up this components. I can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
- ggoo 6y ago
  good - my job is really easy bad - my job is really boring
  - deanCommie 6y ago
    Somehow I don't think physical laborers ever complain when they get new and more powerful tools to make their job easier. It's only software engineers that bemoan their lives getting easier, so they can spend more time working on other problems higher up the abstraction chain.
    - marta_morena_28 6y ago
      And you can spend that time thinking about how not to use a message broker... And maybe just use lower level MANAGED services, like SQS or SNS.
    - dudul 6y ago
      How about when the new powerful tools help get rid of some of them due to productivity gain?
    - OJFord 6y ago
      The 'problems higher up the abstraction chain' are the ones that are closer to labour, or factory work. Mundane and repetitive, relatively speaking easy - requiring less thought and being to die extent trainable as working within a pattern/template.
  - methodin 6y ago
    I beg to differ on your second point - at my company we've fully embraced AWS and putting vendor lock-in issues aside, the end result is focusing more on the application and less on the minutiae of operational issues which is a big win. This makes things much more interesting since you can get there faster and consequently take on more impactful projects in the same timeframe. This in general is a boon for developers in my experience.
rad_gruchalski 6y ago
AMQP 0.9.1 only. Azure Service Bus supports AMQP 1.0 and does not require any servers on the tenant side.
- rb12345 6y ago
  That's true, but a lot of software standardised on RabbitMQ specifically, including its client libraries. That means there's still a lot of demand for AMQP 0.9.1 over 1.0. (RabbitMQ does have a plugin for AMQP 1.0, however.)
- brightonship 6y ago
  Amazon MQ supports ActiveMQ (AMQP1.0) and RabbitMQ (AMQP 0.9.1), so take your pick.
sciurus 6y ago
RIP https://www.cloudamqp.com/ https://www.cloudamqp.com/
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  Nah, they support so many platforms and AWS is only one of them. I also think their Heroku business might actually benefit from this. Now they don't even have to manage the servers themselves -- they can essentially re-sell AWS's service with custom support if they wanted and charge customers to move the cost to Heroku's bill rather than AWS's (you'd be surprised how many do this).
  - mazamats 6y ago
    Reselling AWS's offerings would cost more than running it on bare VM's, I'm sure they would be able to compete on price with them. It also doesn't make sense to rewrite their current software which is probably abstracted for multi-cloud to support re-selling.
    - hardwaresofton 6y ago
      > Reselling AWS's offerings would cost more than running it on bare VM's, I'm sure they would be able to compete on price with them. True -- I do think passing on the cost and taking a tiny margin with drastically reduced maintenance cost could be an attractive business model at scale though. > It also doesn't make sense to rewrite their current software which is probably abstracted for multi-cloud to support re-selling. I have no idea what their current software looks like, do you have any inside knowledge? If they have abstracted, then they probably have multiple implementations of a similar API -- this is just changing one of them (or maybe even cloning it to reduce possibility of breakage). This might be as simple as just changing the AWS-specific provisioner to call out to AmazonMQ instead of EC2, or changing some code that generates terraform/pulumi scripts. One thing I think they'd have to deal with is the fact that they support custom plugins that AmazonMQ may not.
      - 6y ago
tluyben2 6y ago
Offtopic: we are evaluating rabbit at the moment vs activemq; rabbit won for one detail: we need delayed messages (ex. publish {...} in 2h) and activemq seems to support those clustered while rabbit only on one node, which does not fit the business case (we cannot lose messages). I worked with rabbitmq before and it was great but this seems indeed an issue. Someone here with some insights?
- shinydevops 6y ago
  Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding your use case, but I would think you could accomplish this by publishing a durable message to a highly available, durable queue with no consumers, setting a TTL on the message with a policy to publish to a "dead letter exchange" that fronts the queue or queues with your eventual consumers. The durability flags ensure both message and queue survive a restart, while the high availability policy on the queue ensures that each node in the cluster has a copy. And I'm sure there are a few similar patterns that would garner the same desired behavior. I'm not taking a position on whether this is an acceptable level of complexity for the desired feature, of course, just pointing out how one might accomplish it if Rabbit is otherwise desirable.

object_Object 6y ago

Another bold innovative move from AWS.

stock_toaster 6y ago
To be honest, charging for things that other people have created and released for free _is_ pretty bold! ha
- gotts 6y ago
  .. and not contributing back to the community and original authors
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Is it bold? If a group of people put something together and release the details for free, they have to expect others will profit off of it. This is the fate of all useful open source software that doesn't have some kind of no-commercial clause (which potentially moves it outside the ideals of open source as it restricts the use of the source code).
- icedchai 6y ago
  Not really. This has been going on for decades. Examples: early web hosts running the LAMP stack: Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP. Eventually people put an admin UI on top (control panels, like Plesk and cPanel.) The core functionality is all free software. The value is not having to configure and manage all that stuff yourself.
- rajamaka 6y ago
  You are still free to use the free open source version.
- twelve40 6y ago
  There is absolutely nothing wrong with charging for this. Have you heard of "Wordpress hosting" for example?

FatDrunknStupid 6y ago

Semantically idiotic in my experience with the founder

throwaway7281 6y ago

From the FAANG, Amazon strikes me as the one using most open source code while at the same time not having much to show as open source - firecracker is a (relative) toy.

rstupek 6y ago
I'm curious why you'd characterize firecracker as a toy?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  It’s (literally) Google’s crosvm with some changes. AWS forked an existing codebase, made some changes that mostly consisted of removing functionality to tailor the VMM for their use case, and then made a big PR push about “open sourcing” Firecracker as though it was a project they built from scratch. The announcement devoted 1 sentence to the fact that it’s a crosvm fork, and that’s not even the only thing covered in that one sentence. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...
  - whoevercares 6y ago
    Toy in what sense? It’s the backbone of most serverless offering from AWS.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      Toy in the sense that it’s not a significant contribution to the open source community. Edit: In comparison to the scale of Amazon and the scale of contribution of other similarly-sized tech companies. Firecracker would rank as a more major contribution in my book if it wasn’t a cut-down fork of a pre-existing (and still active!) project.
      - anaganisk 6y ago
        Define significant? If you're expecting every open source software user to push a million commits before they can be called "contributors" apart from Microsoft/Facebook I dont see any significant contributors.

slivanes 6y ago

Open source is free to do what you will, but how many PR's does AWS send back to origin?

sg47 6y ago
Usually zero.
EwanToo 6y ago
I don't know about Rabbit MQ, but for redis AWS sends back a lot, so much that one of their developers is now a core team member https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/ https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/
NathanKP 6y ago
Disclosure: I work at AWS and this is my personal opinion. I've seen growing levels of AWS contribution back to upstream projects over the past four years. Teams start out by operating a piece of software at scale, whether it is Redis, Kubernetes, etc. After they have operated it for a while they discover the bugs or performance issues, or customers of the service complain about something. At that point the team now has enough real world experience with that software to begin to contribute back to upstream. It takes time: to learn the ins and outs of the software well enough to know where and what improvements should be made, to understand the software's design and history well enough not to make bad suggestions or contributions that were already determined to be dead ends in the past, and to earn the approval of the community and existing maintainers enough to get significant contributions accepted in the first place.
- wojack2dot0 6y ago
  Hey Thief, Which team you work on? Why would you cheer taking other people's work and defend the monetization? Do you publish PRs secretly pulling from public records, huh? You are not welcome here.
pabs3 6y ago
They have quite a number of commits from various authors to the Linux kernel at least: linux (master=) $ git shortlog -ns --author amazon 79 Arthur Kiyanovski 76 Gal Pressman 59 David Woodhouse 51 Sameeh Jubran 45 Netanel Belgazal 38 KarimAllah Ahmed 35 SeongJae Park 30 Jan H. Schönherr 26 Frank van der Linden 18 Andra Paraschiv 12 Paul Durrant 11 Talel Shenhar 10 Shay Agroskin ...

srameshc 6y ago

Will it force RabbitMQ to also change its open source license model like Redis ?

gauravphoenix 6y ago

I know a lot of HNers believe that AWS just consumes OSS and doesn't contribute back, I just wanted to share what AWS has to say about it- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/setting-the-record-straight-aws-open-source/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/setting-the-record-s... I am in no way defending or attacking anyone,I just want to provide a data point.

OJFord 6y ago
What a bizarre post! Seems really strange to me to see such a 'toys out of the pram' reaction piece like that from an organisation as big and corporate as AWS. That it feels the need to respond like that makes me see it in worse light over the matter rather than better.

bot41 6y ago

Cloud computing seems to be a winner take all scenario. For example, if you use AWS and need a message broker service then you'll use this. If you use Azure, you'll use their version. Development seems like just hooking up this components. I can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

ggoo 6y ago
good - my job is really easy bad - my job is really boring
- deanCommie 6y ago
  Somehow I don't think physical laborers ever complain when they get new and more powerful tools to make their job easier. It's only software engineers that bemoan their lives getting easier, so they can spend more time working on other problems higher up the abstraction chain.
  - marta_morena_28 6y ago
    And you can spend that time thinking about how not to use a message broker... And maybe just use lower level MANAGED services, like SQS or SNS.
  - dudul 6y ago
    How about when the new powerful tools help get rid of some of them due to productivity gain?
  - OJFord 6y ago
    The 'problems higher up the abstraction chain' are the ones that are closer to labour, or factory work. Mundane and repetitive, relatively speaking easy - requiring less thought and being to die extent trainable as working within a pattern/template.
- methodin 6y ago
  I beg to differ on your second point - at my company we've fully embraced AWS and putting vendor lock-in issues aside, the end result is focusing more on the application and less on the minutiae of operational issues which is a big win. This makes things much more interesting since you can get there faster and consequently take on more impactful projects in the same timeframe. This in general is a boon for developers in my experience.

rad_gruchalski 6y ago

AMQP 0.9.1 only. Azure Service Bus supports AMQP 1.0 and does not require any servers on the tenant side.

rb12345 6y ago
That's true, but a lot of software standardised on RabbitMQ specifically, including its client libraries. That means there's still a lot of demand for AMQP 0.9.1 over 1.0. (RabbitMQ does have a plugin for AMQP 1.0, however.)
brightonship 6y ago
Amazon MQ supports ActiveMQ (AMQP1.0) and RabbitMQ (AMQP 0.9.1), so take your pick.

sciurus 6y ago

RIP https://www.cloudamqp.com/ https://www.cloudamqp.com/

hardwaresofton 6y ago
Nah, they support so many platforms and AWS is only one of them. I also think their Heroku business might actually benefit from this. Now they don't even have to manage the servers themselves -- they can essentially re-sell AWS's service with custom support if they wanted and charge customers to move the cost to Heroku's bill rather than AWS's (you'd be surprised how many do this).
- mazamats 6y ago
  Reselling AWS's offerings would cost more than running it on bare VM's, I'm sure they would be able to compete on price with them. It also doesn't make sense to rewrite their current software which is probably abstracted for multi-cloud to support re-selling.
  - hardwaresofton 6y ago
    > Reselling AWS's offerings would cost more than running it on bare VM's, I'm sure they would be able to compete on price with them. True -- I do think passing on the cost and taking a tiny margin with drastically reduced maintenance cost could be an attractive business model at scale though. > It also doesn't make sense to rewrite their current software which is probably abstracted for multi-cloud to support re-selling. I have no idea what their current software looks like, do you have any inside knowledge? If they have abstracted, then they probably have multiple implementations of a similar API -- this is just changing one of them (or maybe even cloning it to reduce possibility of breakage). This might be as simple as just changing the AWS-specific provisioner to call out to AmazonMQ instead of EC2, or changing some code that generates terraform/pulumi scripts. One thing I think they'd have to deal with is the fact that they support custom plugins that AmazonMQ may not.
    - 6y ago

tluyben2 6y ago

Offtopic: we are evaluating rabbit at the moment vs activemq; rabbit won for one detail: we need delayed messages (ex. publish {...} in 2h) and activemq seems to support those clustered while rabbit only on one node, which does not fit the business case (we cannot lose messages). I worked with rabbitmq before and it was great but this seems indeed an issue. Someone here with some insights?

shinydevops 6y ago
Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding your use case, but I would think you could accomplish this by publishing a durable message to a highly available, durable queue with no consumers, setting a TTL on the message with a policy to publish to a "dead letter exchange" that fronts the queue or queues with your eventual consumers. The durability flags ensure both message and queue survive a restart, while the high availability policy on the queue ensures that each node in the cluster has a copy. And I'm sure there are a few similar patterns that would garner the same desired behavior. I'm not taking a position on whether this is an acceptable level of complexity for the desired feature, of course, just pointing out how one might accomplish it if Rabbit is otherwise desirable.