11 ms·

RabbitMQ 4.0

248 points by rhodin 2y ago

rhodin 2y ago
This release includes a new (native, no longer a plugin) AMQP 1.0 implementation, new quorum queue features, and a new schema data store (Khepri)
- sebazzz 2y ago
  AMQP 1.0 is great - then you can, behind the right abstraction layer, use it as drop-in replacement for Azure Service Bus or similar.
fidotron 2y ago
I've regarded RabbitMQ as a secret weapon in plain sight for years. The killer reason people don't use it more is it "doesn't scale" to truly enormous sizes, but for anyone with less than a million users it's great. Too many people end up with their own half rolled pubsub via things like grpc, and they'd be far better off using this, particularly in the early stages of development.
- leetharris 2y ago
  This is how I feel about NATS: https://nats.io/ https://nats.io/ It's an infinitely more friendly version of Kafka, pub/sub, etc that is extremely lightweight. Yet every environment trends towards Kafka because it was "chosen" by the big corps.
  - packetlost 2y ago
    I've used both and NATS is definitely what I'd pick starting out. RabbitMQ is great too, but its heavier and harder to configure. Federation is the killer feature of RabbitMQ that NATS doesn't really have (afaik?).
    - Zambyte 2y ago
      I've never used RabbitMQ, but NATS supports clustering, super clustering, and leaf node connections. I'm guessing the latter is the closest to what would be considered "federation" in this context. Edit: spelling
      - packetlost 2y ago
        None of them are close. RabbitMQ has traffic shaping, MQ->MQ routing (federation), and all sorts of stuff that is super important if you use it as a generalized routing system (vs plain IP). NATS doesn't have that and it's almost certainly firmly out of scope.
        tamalsaha001 2y ago
        NATS can do traffic shaping https://docs.nats.io/nats-concepts/subject_mapping#for-traffic-shaping-in-testing https://docs.nats.io/nats-concepts/subject_mapping#for-traff...
        packetlost 2y ago
        Oh cool, I didn't know it could! Regardless, advanced routing is still something that RabbitMQ has that isn't in NATS. It's not useful for every system, but it is a differentiator. I usually reach for NATS + Jetstream these days, with its object and KV systems it's a really great "all-in-one" for basic stuff.
        je42 2y ago
        Nats also has some basic routing options. Which of RabbitMQ's options would give it the edge when deciding between the two?
        Zambyte 2y ago
        When you say "MQ->MQ routing (federation)" I have a hard time understanding how that is not close to leaf nodes. Leaf nodes allow independently operated / managed NATS servers to share data back and forth, which to me is what federation is about. Do you have any resources you recommend to help me grasp why this is different?
  - shandor 2y ago
    So how about NATS compared to RabbitMQ? If building from scratch, what would drive a design or team towards NATS?
    - hyperadvanced 2y ago
      Have used both extensively: NATS, especially in its most elementary form, is braindead simple, stateless, and ootb functional. If I only want a message broker/pubsub, I pick that. If I know on day 1 that I need queues or persistence, I would probably pick Rabbit over NATS’ offering (Jetstream).
      - ehsanu1 2y ago
        What does Jetstream lack wrt queues/persistence?
        hyperadvanced 2y ago
        It doesn’t lack anything in particular, it’s just heavier weight compared to Rabbit. I would start with amqp and iterate towards NATS with scale
      - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
        Would you use NATS over Redis PubSub or Postgres Notify/Listen? Postgres's option I'm wary of for reasons I've discussed here before but Redis PubSub seems fairly simple to use and likewise not as uber-scalable as Kafka and other more heavyweight message broker systems.
        atombender 2y ago
        Not the parent, but I would. We've been using NATS for about five years at my company, and we recently adopted JetStream, and have been really impressed with it. NATS, especially with JetStream now, is a Swiss Army knife of messaging. It can do RPC, Kafka-type batch streaming, low-latency realtime notifications, large-scale network transfer, offline sync, work queues, mirroring, weighted routing, partitioning... it's incredibly flexible. The simple but powerful primitive you have around subject routing/mapping/transforms, stream placement, replication, offline lead nodes etc. are just fantastic. It's super reliable. It scales from tiny apps to huge ones. The CLI and API tooling around streams and consumers is also fantastic. Everything just feels well-designed and sensible. The new key/value store and blob store (both built on top of JetStream as client-side abstractions) are also super neat, and we've started using this functionality.
  - varispeed 2y ago
    Big corps choose these bloated and complex tools because this way they can justify charging their customers premium and also that their customers won't be able to service such software on their own. It's nothing to do with these apps being superior in any way - often it is the opposite - like reasonable faults and glitches can add more hours to bill the customers for "fixing".
  - frompdx 2y ago
    I agree. NATS is much more simplistic to use and deploy. Easy to run locally for development. Jetstream offers useful features like persistent streams, and kv and object stores.
  - hendler 2y ago
    https://nsq.io/ https://nsq.io/ is also very reliable, stable, lightweight, and easy to use.
  - kragen 2y ago
    nats looks more like a more friendly version of rabbitmq or zeromq than of kafka from these docs: https://docs.nats.io/reference/reference-protocols/nats-protocol-demo https://docs.nats.io/reference/reference-protocols/nats-prot...
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    Maybe because in typical developer fashion their website is absolutely dog-crap at explaining what it does, instead only throwing words here and there "Key value", "pub-sub", "microservices can live anywhere" And? Why do I care? What does "microservices can live anywhere" even mean and what does it have to do with NATS? I find RabbitMQ sometimes inscrutable but I think even their website is better
- nesarkvechnep 2y ago
  Erlang is a secret weapon.
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    RabbiMQ also graciously maintains a very nice Erlang repository for Debian. Reminds me, I'll have to check if they have a working donation link someplace. =3
  - Alupis 2y ago
    Probably better said as "BEAM is a secret weapon". BEAM languages (including Elixir and Gleam) share the benefits Erlang enjoys by also being part of the ecosystem.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  Probably using it wrong if complaining about AMQP queue scale limits... Perhaps people are still thinking in single point of ingress design paradigms. Admittedly RabbitMQ can be a pain to administer for Juniors, but then again so are the other options. =3
- smetj 2y ago
  Agreed. I ran a log ingestion infra 8 years ago doing 20k msg/s sustained on RabbitMQ ... back then we went through a lot of instabilities though they settled over time with new releases. Great times. Besides a quality product the development/release process was very professional and mature. The biggest issue back then was finding a quality client implementation for the language you were using. Not sure what the status of that is these days.
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    AMQP and MQTT are both industry standard protocols. Also, RabbitMQ allows you to abuse the limits set by these standards. Its unfortunate your team ran into performance issues, as Erlang can be inefficient in some situations. Were you using static routes on the DNS load balanced parallel consumers, or relying on the disk caching mechanisms?
- datavirtue 2y ago
  The real reason people don't use it is because they don't know about it or understand it. Then they apply the "it doesn't scale" retroactively. You have to read a lot of docs or you WILL hold RabbitMQ wrong.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    I agree, but there are a lot of footguns with RMQ. A great example of one is that you'll slow down your cluster by adding more RMQ servers (something that's bit us in the past). Which is a forgivable mistake as most people would expect that more cores == faster RMQ. (For RMQ, that doesn't work because Durable messages need to be replicated to the other nodes in the cluster. More nodes == more replication) The ideal RMQ cluster has 3 servers and is dedicated to just a few apps.
    - zbentley 2y ago
      That was true, but the more recent Quorum queues provide more traditional scalability tradeoffs (you can set a ceiling on the number of synchronous replication hops that a published, replicated message goes through): https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/quorum-queues https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/quorum-queues
    - nurettin 2y ago
      The most common elephant foot gun in the room is buggy processes letting queues grow. RMQ immediately slows down (due to mnesia causing delays) and processes start dropping messages despite having system resources to grow.
      - pas 2y ago
        can you elaborate on the details? I have some memories about running OpenStack where Rabbit "was slow", but we never figured out why. mnesia is the storage layer?
        nurettin 2y ago
        Yes, it was using mnesia as the storage layer, and if I had a few dozen queues with a few hundred messages each, it caused timeouts in some clients (celery/kombu is an example). I decided to add expiry policies to each queue so that the system cleans itself from stale messages and that fixed all the message dropping issues. 4.0 Changelogs state that they are switching to a new k/v storage (switching from experimental to default)
- latenightcoding 2y ago
  It isn't more popular because it's not easy to use it properly. I haven't touched it in years so I can't expand, but when I did, I had to write so many wrappers and add extra logic to use it properly.
  - gp 2y ago
    I have found it to be more trouble than it is worth, as well
- heipei 2y ago
  I could say the same thing about NSQ which is a distributed message queue with very simple semantics and a great HTTP API for message publishing and control actions. What it doesn't offer natively is HA though.
  - wejick 2y ago
    People will be surprised on how far you can get NSQ. It doesn't come with any fancy guarantee like only-once or even ordered, this forced developer to think how to design better on the application side. Not saying it's ideal tho.
    - heipei 2y ago
      I don't know why / how messages should be ordered. NSQ is a message queue and not a log. Some messages take longer to process than others, and some messages need to be re-queued and re-tried out of order, and that is a very common use-case. I would love to be able to use a distributed log like Kafka/Redpanda since it's HA out of the box, but it simply does not fit that use-case.
- stackskipton 2y ago
  Also want to give a shoutout to BeanStalkd: https://github.com/beanstalkd/beanstalkd https://github.com/beanstalkd/beanstalkd If you are looking at RabbitMQ with "Maybe this is too much". Beanstalkd likely has features you need with almost none of the setup. Just don't web expose it ;)
  - anachronox 2y ago
    Be careful with it, it will segfault randomly and there hasn't been a fix. After hitting my own posts on the Google groups while sleepily debugging the segfault at wee hours of the morning and getting falsely excited about the possibility of a fix, I gave up and wrote a replacement: https://github.com/chronomq/chronomq https://github.com/chronomq/chronomq Have been running it for years without it falling over, submillisecond operations on average, and has processed billions of messages without failing.
  - petepete 2y ago
    It's supported natively by Rails ActiveJob too! I only used it on one project years ago and it was a pleasure, dead easy to get up and running and rock solid.
  - rjh29 2y ago
    It's the polar opposite of RabbitMQ. It's a single binary written in C, you start it, you send text messages via TCP so writing a client or tooling is dead simple.
- sevenf0ur 2y ago
  How do you manage schema for exchanges, queues, and routing? The pattern seems to be for each client to set up the schema for the parts they touch before hand, but that doesn't scale well. The schema ends up siloed in each project and nobody knows what the current state should be.
  - ansd 2y ago
    Clients creating server topologies does scale very well with the new Khepri metadata store in RabbitMQ 4.0. Applications having an intimate relationship with their middleware (RabbitMQ) and creating flexible routing topologies is one of main strengths of RabbitMQ! RabbitMQ also allows operators to import (exchange, queue, and binding) definitions on boot. Server topologies can nowadays even be declared via YAML files in Kubernetes (https://github.com/rabbitmq/messaging-topology-operator https://github.com/rabbitmq/messaging-topology-operator). This way all the desired state is in one single place and the Kubernetes operator reconciles such that this declaratively declared desired schema is created within RabbitMQ.
- brightball 2y ago
  Is there a big advantage over Redis? Just coming from the Ruby world I know Sidekiq is extremely popular as a Redis backed queue. I know there's a RabbitMQ backed queue called Sneakers that's gained a lot of popularity as well though. Just wondering what the biggest selling points are for somebody making a decision?
  - abe94 2y ago
    We switched from a redis backed queue (bullmq) to rabbit at our company (https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker) when we hit speed issues . We found bull had a much lower throughput, after a lot of tuning compared even to rabbit out of the box. We needed features like job priorities, and complex routing logic and on top of that our software needs to send millions of messages a minute. What we miss is a nice UI to see the state of jobs, and monitor for problems more easily like: https://taskforce.sh/ https://taskforce.sh/
  - cloverich 2y ago
    Been a while since I last used, but IIRC Rabbit is much more featureful than Redis, and has built-in much of what you'd get from Redis + Sidekiq. Their concepts[1] docs provides a good overview. This may be too broad a stroke but what I liked best about it was we used it for our centralized pub sub system, and although we had services in multiple languages / frameworks, they connected to each other through Rabbit, which saved us from having to setup a bunch of different / incompatible job processing systems. Like Redis its battle tested so you know what you are getting complexity / scale wise. At my current gig we use the typical Rails / Sidekiq setup and though it works fine I definitely find myself missing Rabbit. (But in my head Redis / Rabbit have only some overlap, and seeing both at the same company would seem totally normal) [1]: https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/amqp-concepts https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/amqp-concepts
  - tejinderss 2y ago
    At my current place, using Redis with celery is becoming bottleneck for number of concurrent connections it can hold. We are using 1000 workers and start seeing issues (ceiling is 10k connections in Redis); apparently Celery creates huge number of connections. We are considering moving to RabbitMQ for same reason.
- ansd 2y ago
  Modern RabbitMQ scales well. RabbitMQ Streams provide a throughput of millions of messages per second. With native support for MQTT, more than a million users can connect to RabbitMQ: https://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2023/03/21/native-mqtt https://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2023/03/21/native-mqtt The new Khepri metadata store in RabbitMQ 4.0 allows for even better scalability.
- rodrigobellusci 2y ago
  Do you know of any book or video to get started with Rabbit? Earlier this year I tried setting it up as a websockets message broker in a Spring Boot app but failed miserably. I ended up using Spring’s simple broker.
  - ofrzeta 2y ago
    RabbitMQ in Depth https://www.manning.com/books/rabbitmq-in-depth https://www.manning.com/books/rabbitmq-in-depth The author is hanging out here, too.
- joshlemer 2y ago
  Do you have any recommended resources to learn how to apply these tools (RabbitMQ, Nats, etc) to typical enterprise services? Common patterns/usecases/best practices and things?
- hztar 2y ago
  whut.. transferred TB of data per hour with Rabbit.. does it not scale anymore?
- hk1337 2y ago
  I know this is said a lot about things people don't like or think doesn't scale but I think I a lot of people don't set it up and use properly and it doesn't scale doing their half-baked implementation.
- matrix2003 2y ago
  If you like RabbitMQ, check out NATS! I can’t speak to the new version, but it comes with support for even more messaging patterns out of the box.
- bankcust08385 2y ago
  The anti-pattern to be avoided is cobbling together a nonperformant grand centralized ESB and making it a SPoF and bottleneck for everything, but it depends entirely on the use-case. MQTT scales to millions of devices for low data rates. ZK works well for little bits of coherent distributed cluster metadata. Kafka has its niches. ZMQ helps in others.
- saberience 2y ago
  I've seen it used for a company with way, way in excess of a million users. We used it for a system with 100M+ users for our login systems and in general all of our main account systems relied on it. Most of the brokers were always running at 15k to 25k messages per second. I loved it and the only issues we had were due to our fuckups.
- jimbokun 2y ago
  For me the killer feature of Kafka is that topics are persistent until the data expires. Meaning different readers can be working at different offsets. And you can rewind or fast forward the offset you are reading, which can really be a life saver when things go sideways. Does RabbitMQ have equivalent features?
  - rhodin 2y ago
    Yes, a stream queue type [0] is available where you can set retention, and replay messages. [0] https://www.rabbitmq.com/stream.html https://www.rabbitmq.com/stream.html
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  I think people don't use it more because people don't really know what it is. From their website: > RabbitMQ is a reliable and mature messaging and streaming broker, which is easy to deploy on cloud environments, on-premises, and on your local machine. What does that mean? "Messaging and streaming broker"? I understand the need for worker queues to process videos, images, emails and such but I can't easily tell if that's what this is. Also, what are the benefits of this over just processing incomplete records straight out of my database? i.e. using MySQL as a queue.
  - sieabahlpark 2y ago
    [dead]
  - halfcat 2y ago
    > what are the benefits of this over just processing incomplete records straight out of my database? i.e. using MySQL as a queue Mainly throughput and latency. I haven’t used MySQL recently so some of this may apply more to Postgres. Postgres has LISTEN/NOTIFY which helps with latency. I don’t think MySQL has LISTEN/NOTIFY, which means you’d have to resort to polling. You have to use the `SELECT … FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED LIMIT 1` features to grab a message from the queue table, so multiple consumers don’t pull the same message. The biggest issue, if you’re trying to achieve decent throughput, is dealing with bloat (empty pages still sitting on the disk that haven’t been cleaned up yet). You can run vacuum but an online vacuum will only mark the pages as available for reuse (doesn’t free up the disk space). And if you run a full vacuum (which will free the disk space) it locks the entire database while it runs the vacuum. This can compound if you’re using indexes. One way of dealing with this is setting up partitioning by message timestamp, so that as old messages roll out, you can just drop those partitions and not have to deal with vacuum. It can work if your queue needs are low throughput or can tolerate higher latency, but there are some things to manage, and realistically setting up a Redis instance is probably less complex than trying to work around the database-specific quirks, unless you’re already very familiar with your database’s inner workings.
- dyeje 2y ago
  If you’re not worried about scale, I’d just use a database backed queue.
edweis 2y ago
For what reason should we move from SNS/SQS to RabbitMQ? Our SaaS processes ~20 events/second.
- declan_roberts 2y ago
  That's like $0.50/day in aws costs. Absolutely no reason to switch if it's working.
  - RadiozRadioz 2y ago
    When you said that number, I had a completely different reaction. 20 messages per second is absolutely nothing, $0.50 per day for that is dreadful. A $5 per month ($0.16 per day) VPS can deliver many thousands of messages per second.
    - zedpm 2y ago
      $10/month difference is, to use your phrasing, absolutely nothing. It's not worth anyone's time to make that switch unless it's some toy app paid for out of pocket.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - Alupis 2y ago
        Most software businesses start off as "toy apps" and are paid for out of pocket. The parent's comment is right - that is a lot of money for not a lot of value, particularly when you are early stage. The trick is in finding balance between paying ridiculous fees (relative to your revenue/customer base) to make things more simple vs. find another way and spend your time instead. A prime example are identify provider services, such as Auth0. The free tier is good enough for development, but as soon as you expect to onboard customers the free tier starts to feel deliberately gimped. Are you willing to spend $20 a month just to use a custom login domain? For the zero customers you have? $20 a month might feel like "nothing", but it's $20 a month forever and it's $20 a month that could be allocated to other things, such as compute or your accounting software. It's not always that clear cut, however.
Jenk 2y ago
I lost a lot of respect for the RabbitMQ maintainers when they refused to honor the semantic versioning scheme in package managers like nuget/maven/etc. "Safely upgrading" was impossible. 3.5 => 3.6 saw the removal of an argument. They didn't lose my respect for the removal of the argument, however, they lost my respect for whatabouting the conversation calling SemVer a "no true scotsman" fallacy, then trying to claim that removing a redundant argument is not a breaking change, and other reality-warping nonsense, before blocking myself and other complainants from their issues - and even deleting some of their own comments to mop up some of their own terrible reasoning. I'm sure there is no love lost on their side, either. Personal rant over.
- 57546gwg 2y ago
  Based. fuck semver.
- sebazzz 2y ago
  > I lost a lot of respect for the RabbitMQ maintainers when they refused to honor the semantic versioning scheme in package managers like nuget/maven/etc. "Safely upgrading" was impossible. 3.5 => 3.6 saw the removal of an argument. Well, at least AMQP 1.0 is now supported so I expect that for most things you are able to use any client now.
383toast 2y ago
does celery work with this out of the box?
- jihadjihad 2y ago
  It should--RabbitMQ is the default broker https://docs.celeryq.dev/en/stable/getting-started/backends-and-brokers/rabbitmq.html https://docs.celeryq.dev/en/stable/getting-started/backends-...
  - phishhook 2y ago
    There are some limitations when using Quorum Queues, this was only patched recently - https://github.com/celery/celery/issues/9149 https://github.com/celery/celery/issues/9149
raminf 2y ago
RabbitMQ can also act as a native MQTT broker. For edge applications/devices, you can also use MQTT over websockets: https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/web-mqtt https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/web-mqtt Edit: FWIW, NATS also supports MQTT: https://docs.nats.io/running-a-nats-service/configuration/mqtt https://docs.nats.io/running-a-nats-service/configuration/mq...
mrbluecoat 2y ago
Any pros/cons compared to EMQX, NanoMQ, or FlashMQ?
phishhook 2y ago
Would be keen to know if this passes Jepsen style tests now
depr 2y ago
RabbitMQ is developed by VMware which was acquired by Broadcom. I hope they will remain unaffected.
PHGamer 2y ago
interesting so there is no more free support for rabbitmq is what im seeing here for the most part.
okr 2y ago
The linked github page gives me 404. But here are the release notes: https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/blob/main/release-notes/4.0.1.md https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/blob/main/releas...
- justinclift 2y ago
  Looks like 4.0.0 was pulled and replaced with a 4.0.1 release.
tony-allan 2y ago
https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/releases/tag/v4.0.1 https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/releases/tag/v4....
BurnGpuBurn 2y ago
Link without description or anything, nice. After reading the website for 30 seconds, my question would be: What is RabbitMQ?
- bdcravens 2y ago
  You could say the same thing of any product update link, like the latest versions of Rails, Postgresql, Mongodb, etc. A general assumption is that there are many products that the community is already familiar with, so that an introduction is unnecessary.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

248 points by rhodin 2y ago

This release includes a new (native, no longer a plugin) AMQP 1.0 implementation, new quorum queue features, and a new schema data store (Khepri)

sebazzz 2y ago
AMQP 1.0 is great - then you can, behind the right abstraction layer, use it as drop-in replacement for Azure Service Bus or similar.

fidotron 2y ago

I've regarded RabbitMQ as a secret weapon in plain sight for years. The killer reason people don't use it more is it "doesn't scale" to truly enormous sizes, but for anyone with less than a million users it's great. Too many people end up with their own half rolled pubsub via things like grpc, and they'd be far better off using this, particularly in the early stages of development.

leetharris 2y ago
This is how I feel about NATS: https://nats.io/ https://nats.io/ It's an infinitely more friendly version of Kafka, pub/sub, etc that is extremely lightweight. Yet every environment trends towards Kafka because it was "chosen" by the big corps.
- packetlost 2y ago
  I've used both and NATS is definitely what I'd pick starting out. RabbitMQ is great too, but its heavier and harder to configure. Federation is the killer feature of RabbitMQ that NATS doesn't really have (afaik?).
  - Zambyte 2y ago
    I've never used RabbitMQ, but NATS supports clustering, super clustering, and leaf node connections. I'm guessing the latter is the closest to what would be considered "federation" in this context. Edit: spelling
    - packetlost 2y ago
      None of them are close. RabbitMQ has traffic shaping, MQ->MQ routing (federation), and all sorts of stuff that is super important if you use it as a generalized routing system (vs plain IP). NATS doesn't have that and it's almost certainly firmly out of scope.
      - tamalsaha001 2y ago
        NATS can do traffic shaping https://docs.nats.io/nats-concepts/subject_mapping#for-traffic-shaping-in-testing https://docs.nats.io/nats-concepts/subject_mapping#for-traff...
        packetlost 2y ago
        Oh cool, I didn't know it could! Regardless, advanced routing is still something that RabbitMQ has that isn't in NATS. It's not useful for every system, but it is a differentiator. I usually reach for NATS + Jetstream these days, with its object and KV systems it's a really great "all-in-one" for basic stuff.
        je42 2y ago
        Nats also has some basic routing options. Which of RabbitMQ's options would give it the edge when deciding between the two?
      - Zambyte 2y ago
        When you say "MQ->MQ routing (federation)" I have a hard time understanding how that is not close to leaf nodes. Leaf nodes allow independently operated / managed NATS servers to share data back and forth, which to me is what federation is about. Do you have any resources you recommend to help me grasp why this is different?
- shandor 2y ago
  So how about NATS compared to RabbitMQ? If building from scratch, what would drive a design or team towards NATS?
  - hyperadvanced 2y ago
    Have used both extensively: NATS, especially in its most elementary form, is braindead simple, stateless, and ootb functional. If I only want a message broker/pubsub, I pick that. If I know on day 1 that I need queues or persistence, I would probably pick Rabbit over NATS’ offering (Jetstream).
    - ehsanu1 2y ago
      What does Jetstream lack wrt queues/persistence?
      - hyperadvanced 2y ago
        It doesn’t lack anything in particular, it’s just heavier weight compared to Rabbit. I would start with amqp and iterate towards NATS with scale
    - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
      Would you use NATS over Redis PubSub or Postgres Notify/Listen? Postgres's option I'm wary of for reasons I've discussed here before but Redis PubSub seems fairly simple to use and likewise not as uber-scalable as Kafka and other more heavyweight message broker systems.
      - atombender 2y ago
        Not the parent, but I would. We've been using NATS for about five years at my company, and we recently adopted JetStream, and have been really impressed with it. NATS, especially with JetStream now, is a Swiss Army knife of messaging. It can do RPC, Kafka-type batch streaming, low-latency realtime notifications, large-scale network transfer, offline sync, work queues, mirroring, weighted routing, partitioning... it's incredibly flexible. The simple but powerful primitive you have around subject routing/mapping/transforms, stream placement, replication, offline lead nodes etc. are just fantastic. It's super reliable. It scales from tiny apps to huge ones. The CLI and API tooling around streams and consumers is also fantastic. Everything just feels well-designed and sensible. The new key/value store and blob store (both built on top of JetStream as client-side abstractions) are also super neat, and we've started using this functionality.
- varispeed 2y ago
  Big corps choose these bloated and complex tools because this way they can justify charging their customers premium and also that their customers won't be able to service such software on their own. It's nothing to do with these apps being superior in any way - often it is the opposite - like reasonable faults and glitches can add more hours to bill the customers for "fixing".
- frompdx 2y ago
  I agree. NATS is much more simplistic to use and deploy. Easy to run locally for development. Jetstream offers useful features like persistent streams, and kv and object stores.
- hendler 2y ago
  https://nsq.io/ https://nsq.io/ is also very reliable, stable, lightweight, and easy to use.
- kragen 2y ago
  nats looks more like a more friendly version of rabbitmq or zeromq than of kafka from these docs: https://docs.nats.io/reference/reference-protocols/nats-protocol-demo https://docs.nats.io/reference/reference-protocols/nats-prot...
- raverbashing 2y ago
  Maybe because in typical developer fashion their website is absolutely dog-crap at explaining what it does, instead only throwing words here and there "Key value", "pub-sub", "microservices can live anywhere" And? Why do I care? What does "microservices can live anywhere" even mean and what does it have to do with NATS? I find RabbitMQ sometimes inscrutable but I think even their website is better
nesarkvechnep 2y ago
Erlang is a secret weapon.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  RabbiMQ also graciously maintains a very nice Erlang repository for Debian. Reminds me, I'll have to check if they have a working donation link someplace. =3
- Alupis 2y ago
  Probably better said as "BEAM is a secret weapon". BEAM languages (including Elixir and Gleam) share the benefits Erlang enjoys by also being part of the ecosystem.
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
Probably using it wrong if complaining about AMQP queue scale limits... Perhaps people are still thinking in single point of ingress design paradigms. Admittedly RabbitMQ can be a pain to administer for Juniors, but then again so are the other options. =3
smetj 2y ago
Agreed. I ran a log ingestion infra 8 years ago doing 20k msg/s sustained on RabbitMQ ... back then we went through a lot of instabilities though they settled over time with new releases. Great times. Besides a quality product the development/release process was very professional and mature. The biggest issue back then was finding a quality client implementation for the language you were using. Not sure what the status of that is these days.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  AMQP and MQTT are both industry standard protocols. Also, RabbitMQ allows you to abuse the limits set by these standards. Its unfortunate your team ran into performance issues, as Erlang can be inefficient in some situations. Were you using static routes on the DNS load balanced parallel consumers, or relying on the disk caching mechanisms?
datavirtue 2y ago
The real reason people don't use it is because they don't know about it or understand it. Then they apply the "it doesn't scale" retroactively. You have to read a lot of docs or you WILL hold RabbitMQ wrong.
- cogman10 2y ago
  I agree, but there are a lot of footguns with RMQ. A great example of one is that you'll slow down your cluster by adding more RMQ servers (something that's bit us in the past). Which is a forgivable mistake as most people would expect that more cores == faster RMQ. (For RMQ, that doesn't work because Durable messages need to be replicated to the other nodes in the cluster. More nodes == more replication) The ideal RMQ cluster has 3 servers and is dedicated to just a few apps.
  - zbentley 2y ago
    That was true, but the more recent Quorum queues provide more traditional scalability tradeoffs (you can set a ceiling on the number of synchronous replication hops that a published, replicated message goes through): https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/quorum-queues https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/quorum-queues
  - nurettin 2y ago
    The most common elephant foot gun in the room is buggy processes letting queues grow. RMQ immediately slows down (due to mnesia causing delays) and processes start dropping messages despite having system resources to grow.
    - pas 2y ago
      can you elaborate on the details? I have some memories about running OpenStack where Rabbit "was slow", but we never figured out why. mnesia is the storage layer?
      - nurettin 2y ago
        Yes, it was using mnesia as the storage layer, and if I had a few dozen queues with a few hundred messages each, it caused timeouts in some clients (celery/kombu is an example). I decided to add expiry policies to each queue so that the system cleans itself from stale messages and that fixed all the message dropping issues. 4.0 Changelogs state that they are switching to a new k/v storage (switching from experimental to default)
latenightcoding 2y ago
It isn't more popular because it's not easy to use it properly. I haven't touched it in years so I can't expand, but when I did, I had to write so many wrappers and add extra logic to use it properly.
- gp 2y ago
  I have found it to be more trouble than it is worth, as well
heipei 2y ago
I could say the same thing about NSQ which is a distributed message queue with very simple semantics and a great HTTP API for message publishing and control actions. What it doesn't offer natively is HA though.
- wejick 2y ago
  People will be surprised on how far you can get NSQ. It doesn't come with any fancy guarantee like only-once or even ordered, this forced developer to think how to design better on the application side. Not saying it's ideal tho.
  - heipei 2y ago
    I don't know why / how messages should be ordered. NSQ is a message queue and not a log. Some messages take longer to process than others, and some messages need to be re-queued and re-tried out of order, and that is a very common use-case. I would love to be able to use a distributed log like Kafka/Redpanda since it's HA out of the box, but it simply does not fit that use-case.
stackskipton 2y ago
Also want to give a shoutout to BeanStalkd: https://github.com/beanstalkd/beanstalkd https://github.com/beanstalkd/beanstalkd If you are looking at RabbitMQ with "Maybe this is too much". Beanstalkd likely has features you need with almost none of the setup. Just don't web expose it ;)
- anachronox 2y ago
  Be careful with it, it will segfault randomly and there hasn't been a fix. After hitting my own posts on the Google groups while sleepily debugging the segfault at wee hours of the morning and getting falsely excited about the possibility of a fix, I gave up and wrote a replacement: https://github.com/chronomq/chronomq https://github.com/chronomq/chronomq Have been running it for years without it falling over, submillisecond operations on average, and has processed billions of messages without failing.
- petepete 2y ago
  It's supported natively by Rails ActiveJob too! I only used it on one project years ago and it was a pleasure, dead easy to get up and running and rock solid.
- rjh29 2y ago
  It's the polar opposite of RabbitMQ. It's a single binary written in C, you start it, you send text messages via TCP so writing a client or tooling is dead simple.
sevenf0ur 2y ago
How do you manage schema for exchanges, queues, and routing? The pattern seems to be for each client to set up the schema for the parts they touch before hand, but that doesn't scale well. The schema ends up siloed in each project and nobody knows what the current state should be.
- ansd 2y ago
  Clients creating server topologies does scale very well with the new Khepri metadata store in RabbitMQ 4.0. Applications having an intimate relationship with their middleware (RabbitMQ) and creating flexible routing topologies is one of main strengths of RabbitMQ! RabbitMQ also allows operators to import (exchange, queue, and binding) definitions on boot. Server topologies can nowadays even be declared via YAML files in Kubernetes (https://github.com/rabbitmq/messaging-topology-operator https://github.com/rabbitmq/messaging-topology-operator). This way all the desired state is in one single place and the Kubernetes operator reconciles such that this declaratively declared desired schema is created within RabbitMQ.
brightball 2y ago
Is there a big advantage over Redis? Just coming from the Ruby world I know Sidekiq is extremely popular as a Redis backed queue. I know there's a RabbitMQ backed queue called Sneakers that's gained a lot of popularity as well though. Just wondering what the biggest selling points are for somebody making a decision?
- abe94 2y ago
  We switched from a redis backed queue (bullmq) to rabbit at our company (https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker) when we hit speed issues . We found bull had a much lower throughput, after a lot of tuning compared even to rabbit out of the box. We needed features like job priorities, and complex routing logic and on top of that our software needs to send millions of messages a minute. What we miss is a nice UI to see the state of jobs, and monitor for problems more easily like: https://taskforce.sh/ https://taskforce.sh/
- cloverich 2y ago
  Been a while since I last used, but IIRC Rabbit is much more featureful than Redis, and has built-in much of what you'd get from Redis + Sidekiq. Their concepts[1] docs provides a good overview. This may be too broad a stroke but what I liked best about it was we used it for our centralized pub sub system, and although we had services in multiple languages / frameworks, they connected to each other through Rabbit, which saved us from having to setup a bunch of different / incompatible job processing systems. Like Redis its battle tested so you know what you are getting complexity / scale wise. At my current gig we use the typical Rails / Sidekiq setup and though it works fine I definitely find myself missing Rabbit. (But in my head Redis / Rabbit have only some overlap, and seeing both at the same company would seem totally normal) [1]: https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/amqp-concepts https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/amqp-concepts
- tejinderss 2y ago
  At my current place, using Redis with celery is becoming bottleneck for number of concurrent connections it can hold. We are using 1000 workers and start seeing issues (ceiling is 10k connections in Redis); apparently Celery creates huge number of connections. We are considering moving to RabbitMQ for same reason.
ansd 2y ago
Modern RabbitMQ scales well. RabbitMQ Streams provide a throughput of millions of messages per second. With native support for MQTT, more than a million users can connect to RabbitMQ: https://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2023/03/21/native-mqtt https://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2023/03/21/native-mqtt The new Khepri metadata store in RabbitMQ 4.0 allows for even better scalability.
rodrigobellusci 2y ago
Do you know of any book or video to get started with Rabbit? Earlier this year I tried setting it up as a websockets message broker in a Spring Boot app but failed miserably. I ended up using Spring’s simple broker.
- ofrzeta 2y ago
  RabbitMQ in Depth https://www.manning.com/books/rabbitmq-in-depth https://www.manning.com/books/rabbitmq-in-depth The author is hanging out here, too.
joshlemer 2y ago
Do you have any recommended resources to learn how to apply these tools (RabbitMQ, Nats, etc) to typical enterprise services? Common patterns/usecases/best practices and things?
hztar 2y ago
whut.. transferred TB of data per hour with Rabbit.. does it not scale anymore?
hk1337 2y ago
I know this is said a lot about things people don't like or think doesn't scale but I think I a lot of people don't set it up and use properly and it doesn't scale doing their half-baked implementation.
matrix2003 2y ago
If you like RabbitMQ, check out NATS! I can’t speak to the new version, but it comes with support for even more messaging patterns out of the box.
bankcust08385 2y ago
The anti-pattern to be avoided is cobbling together a nonperformant grand centralized ESB and making it a SPoF and bottleneck for everything, but it depends entirely on the use-case. MQTT scales to millions of devices for low data rates. ZK works well for little bits of coherent distributed cluster metadata. Kafka has its niches. ZMQ helps in others.
saberience 2y ago
I've seen it used for a company with way, way in excess of a million users. We used it for a system with 100M+ users for our login systems and in general all of our main account systems relied on it. Most of the brokers were always running at 15k to 25k messages per second. I loved it and the only issues we had were due to our fuckups.
jimbokun 2y ago
For me the killer feature of Kafka is that topics are persistent until the data expires. Meaning different readers can be working at different offsets. And you can rewind or fast forward the offset you are reading, which can really be a life saver when things go sideways. Does RabbitMQ have equivalent features?
- rhodin 2y ago
  Yes, a stream queue type [0] is available where you can set retention, and replay messages. [0] https://www.rabbitmq.com/stream.html https://www.rabbitmq.com/stream.html
8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
I think people don't use it more because people don't really know what it is. From their website: > RabbitMQ is a reliable and mature messaging and streaming broker, which is easy to deploy on cloud environments, on-premises, and on your local machine. What does that mean? "Messaging and streaming broker"? I understand the need for worker queues to process videos, images, emails and such but I can't easily tell if that's what this is. Also, what are the benefits of this over just processing incomplete records straight out of my database? i.e. using MySQL as a queue.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  [dead]
- halfcat 2y ago
  > what are the benefits of this over just processing incomplete records straight out of my database? i.e. using MySQL as a queue Mainly throughput and latency. I haven’t used MySQL recently so some of this may apply more to Postgres. Postgres has LISTEN/NOTIFY which helps with latency. I don’t think MySQL has LISTEN/NOTIFY, which means you’d have to resort to polling. You have to use the `SELECT … FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED LIMIT 1` features to grab a message from the queue table, so multiple consumers don’t pull the same message. The biggest issue, if you’re trying to achieve decent throughput, is dealing with bloat (empty pages still sitting on the disk that haven’t been cleaned up yet). You can run vacuum but an online vacuum will only mark the pages as available for reuse (doesn’t free up the disk space). And if you run a full vacuum (which will free the disk space) it locks the entire database while it runs the vacuum. This can compound if you’re using indexes. One way of dealing with this is setting up partitioning by message timestamp, so that as old messages roll out, you can just drop those partitions and not have to deal with vacuum. It can work if your queue needs are low throughput or can tolerate higher latency, but there are some things to manage, and realistically setting up a Redis instance is probably less complex than trying to work around the database-specific quirks, unless you’re already very familiar with your database’s inner workings.
dyeje 2y ago
If you’re not worried about scale, I’d just use a database backed queue.

edweis 2y ago

For what reason should we move from SNS/SQS to RabbitMQ? Our SaaS processes ~20 events/second.

declan_roberts 2y ago
That's like $0.50/day in aws costs. Absolutely no reason to switch if it's working.
- RadiozRadioz 2y ago
  When you said that number, I had a completely different reaction. 20 messages per second is absolutely nothing, $0.50 per day for that is dreadful. A $5 per month ($0.16 per day) VPS can deliver many thousands of messages per second.
  - zedpm 2y ago
    $10/month difference is, to use your phrasing, absolutely nothing. It's not worth anyone's time to make that switch unless it's some toy app paid for out of pocket.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Alupis 2y ago
      Most software businesses start off as "toy apps" and are paid for out of pocket. The parent's comment is right - that is a lot of money for not a lot of value, particularly when you are early stage. The trick is in finding balance between paying ridiculous fees (relative to your revenue/customer base) to make things more simple vs. find another way and spend your time instead. A prime example are identify provider services, such as Auth0. The free tier is good enough for development, but as soon as you expect to onboard customers the free tier starts to feel deliberately gimped. Are you willing to spend $20 a month just to use a custom login domain? For the zero customers you have? $20 a month might feel like "nothing", but it's $20 a month forever and it's $20 a month that could be allocated to other things, such as compute or your accounting software. It's not always that clear cut, however.

Jenk 2y ago

I lost a lot of respect for the RabbitMQ maintainers when they refused to honor the semantic versioning scheme in package managers like nuget/maven/etc. "Safely upgrading" was impossible. 3.5 => 3.6 saw the removal of an argument. They didn't lose my respect for the removal of the argument, however, they lost my respect for whatabouting the conversation calling SemVer a "no true scotsman" fallacy, then trying to claim that removing a redundant argument is not a breaking change, and other reality-warping nonsense, before blocking myself and other complainants from their issues - and even deleting some of their own comments to mop up some of their own terrible reasoning. I'm sure there is no love lost on their side, either. Personal rant over.

57546gwg 2y ago
Based. fuck semver.
sebazzz 2y ago
> I lost a lot of respect for the RabbitMQ maintainers when they refused to honor the semantic versioning scheme in package managers like nuget/maven/etc. "Safely upgrading" was impossible. 3.5 => 3.6 saw the removal of an argument. Well, at least AMQP 1.0 is now supported so I expect that for most things you are able to use any client now.

383toast 2y ago

does celery work with this out of the box?

jihadjihad 2y ago
It should--RabbitMQ is the default broker https://docs.celeryq.dev/en/stable/getting-started/backends-and-brokers/rabbitmq.html https://docs.celeryq.dev/en/stable/getting-started/backends-...
- phishhook 2y ago
  There are some limitations when using Quorum Queues, this was only patched recently - https://github.com/celery/celery/issues/9149 https://github.com/celery/celery/issues/9149

raminf 2y ago

RabbitMQ can also act as a native MQTT broker. For edge applications/devices, you can also use MQTT over websockets: https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/web-mqtt https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/web-mqtt Edit: FWIW, NATS also supports MQTT: https://docs.nats.io/running-a-nats-service/configuration/mqtt https://docs.nats.io/running-a-nats-service/configuration/mq...

mrbluecoat 2y ago

Any pros/cons compared to EMQX, NanoMQ, or FlashMQ?

phishhook 2y ago

Would be keen to know if this passes Jepsen style tests now

depr 2y ago

RabbitMQ is developed by VMware which was acquired by Broadcom. I hope they will remain unaffected.

PHGamer 2y ago

interesting so there is no more free support for rabbitmq is what im seeing here for the most part.

okr 2y ago

The linked github page gives me 404. But here are the release notes: https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/blob/main/release-notes/4.0.1.md https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/blob/main/releas...

justinclift 2y ago
Looks like 4.0.0 was pulled and replaced with a 4.0.1 release.

tony-allan 2y ago

https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/releases/tag/v4.0.1 https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/releases/tag/v4....

BurnGpuBurn 2y ago

Link without description or anything, nice. After reading the website for 30 seconds, my question would be: What is RabbitMQ?

bdcravens 2y ago
You could say the same thing of any product update link, like the latest versions of Rails, Postgresql, Mongodb, etc. A general assumption is that there are many products that the community is already familiar with, so that an introduction is unnecessary.

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