Microsoft offers Azure Service Bus as a reliable cloud messaging as a service (MaaS) and simple hybrid integration solution.
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RabbitMQ
Score 8.4 out of 10
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RabbitMQ, an open source message broker, is part of Pivotal Software, a VMware company acquired in 2019, and supports message queue, multiple messaging protocols, and more.
RabbitMQ is available open source, however VMware also offers a range of commercial services for RabbitMQ; these are available as part of the Pivotal App Suite.
RabbitMQ is simple and awesome... but so is Azure Service Bus. Both accomplish the same thing but in different environments. If you're building a cloud-native application - especially one that is serverless by design - Azure Service Bus is the only real choice in Azure. It …
RabbitMQ has a few advantages over Azure Service Bus 1) RMQ handles substantially larger files - ASB tops out at 100MB, we use RabbitMQfor files over 200MB 2) RabbitMQ can be easily setup on prem - Azure Service Bus is cloud only
If you need a cloud-based service bus or a simple to use queue/topic/routing/pub-sub service, then Azure Service Bus is a very good choice at a reasonable price and performance. Typically on-premise we'd use RabbitMQ because it "just works", but if you're building a "cloud-first" application, then this is the one to go with. It's especially easy to integrate with if you're already embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem.
It is highly recommended that if you have microservices architecture and if you want to solve 2 phase commit issue, you should use RabbitMQ for communication between microservices. It is a quick and reliable mode of communication between microservices. It is also helpful if you want to implement a job and worker mechanism. You can push the jobs into RabbitMQ and that will be sent to the consumer. It is highly reliable so you won't miss any jobs and you can also implement a retry of jobs with the dead letter queue feature. It will be also helpful in time-consuming API. You can put time-consuming items into a queue so they will be processed later and your API will be quick.
Acting as a basic queuing service it works very well.
One of the best parts is that Azure Service Bus can work over HTTPS which helps in strict firewall situations. There is a performance hit if you choose to use HTTPS.
The routing capabilities are quite good when using topics and subscriptions. You can apply filters using a pseudo-SQL-like language though the correlation filters are quick and easy options.
Costs are very reasonable at low-ish volumes. If you're processing 10's of millions of messages a month... it may be a different story.
What RabbitMQ does well is what it's advertised to do. It is good at providing lots of high volume, high availability queue. We've seen it handle upwards of 10 million messages in its queues, spread out over 200 queues before its publish/consume rates dipped. So yeah, it can definitely handle a lot of messages and a lot of queues. Depending on the size of the machine RabbitMQ is running on, I'm sure it can handle more.
Decent number of plugins! Want a plugin that gives you an interface to view all the queues and see their publish/consume rates? Yes, there's one for that. Want a plugin to "shovel" messages from one queue to another in an emergency? Check. Want a plugin that does extra logging for all the messages received? Got you covered!
Lots of configuration possibilities. We've tuned over 100 settings over the past year to get the performance and reliability just right. This could be a downside though--it's pretty confusing and some settings were hard to understand.
It breaks communication if we don't acknowledge early. In some cases our work items are time consuming that will take a time and in that scenario we are getting errors that RabbitMQ broke the channel. It will be good if RabbitMQ provides two acknowledgements, one is for that it has been received at client side and second ack is client is completed the processing part.
RabbitMQ is very usable if you are a programmer or DevOps engineer. You can setup and configure a messaging system without any programmatic knowledge either through an admin console plugin or through a command-line interface. It's very easy to spin up additional consumers when volume is heavy and it's very easy to manage those consumers either through automated scripting or through their admin console. Because it's language agnostic it integrates with any system supporting AMQP.
RabbitMQ is more software than service so there's no real customer service to speak of unless you go with a provider such as CloudAMQP. So I'll just speak on CloudAMQP. Their customer support is only okay: they only do it over email. They frequently gloss over our support tickets and half answer them without delving deeply or investigating our issues. Their response times are pretty reasonable though.
RabbitMQ is simple and awesome... but so is Azure Service Bus. Both accomplish the same thing but in different environments. If you're building a cloud-native application - especially one that is serverless by design - Azure Service Bus is the only real choice in Azure. It works well, it's performance, and it's reasonably priced in the Standard tier. From our testing, RMQ is more performant, but it's hard to compare service-based implementations vs RMQ installed on VMs.
RabbitMQ has a few advantages over Azure Service Bus 1) RMQ handles substantially larger files - ASB tops out at 100MB, we use RabbitMQfor files over 200MB 2) RabbitMQ can be easily setup on prem - Azure Service Bus is cloud only 3) RabbitMQ exchanges are easier to configure over ASB subscriptions ASB has a few advantages too 1) Cloud based - just a few mouse clicks and you're up and running
Earlier we had a problem with missing work items with our own implementation but later using RabbitMQ is solved a problem. Now our job processing mechanism is highly reliable.
We also had a problem with scaling, processing 1k work items per second. RabbitMQ helped us to scale well with increasing work items.
