Recently I saw a tweet saying "ZeroMQ Erlangizes everything!" or some such. While I realise that not everything posted on the web is meant seriously, it does seem there is a stream of similar claims lately that ought to be dammed.

In the article Multi-threading Magic[^1], Pieter Hintjens and Martin Sustrik persuasively explain why concurrency is better served by message-passing than by locks and shared memory. And they are fair, I think, in their analysis -- except for the insinuation that using ZeroMQ transforms your chosen programming language into a domestic Erlang.

Note: this blog post talks about the federation plugin preview that was released for RabbitMQ 2.5.0. If you're using 2.6.0 or later, federation is part of the main release; get it the same way you would any other plugin.

Another day, another new plugin release 😃 Today it's federation. If you want to skip this post and just download the plugin, go here. The detailed instructions are here.

The high level goal of federation is to scale out publish / subscribe messaging across WANs and administrative domains.

To do this we introduce the concept of the federation exchange. A federation exchange acts like a normal exchange of a given type (it can emulate the routing logic of any installed exchange type), but also knows how to connect to upstream exchanges (which might in turn themselves be federation exchanges).

The RabbitMQ team is delighted to announce the release of RabbitMQ 2.5.0.

Most of us at RabbitMQ HQ have spend time working in a number of functional languages in addition to Erlang, such as Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, OCaml or others. Whilst there is lots to like about Erlang, such as its VM/Emulator, there are inevitably features that we all miss from other languages. In my case, having spent a couple of years working in Haskell before returning to the RabbitMQ fold, all sorts of features are "missing", such as laziness, type classes, additional infix operators, the ability to specify precedence of functions, fewer parenthesis, partial application, more consistent standard libraries and do-notation. That's a fair list, and it'll take me a while to get around to implementing them all in Erlang, but here are two for starters.

In our previous blog post we talked about a few approaches to topic routing optimization and described the two more important of these in brief. In this post, we will talk about a few things we tried when implementing the DFA, as well as some performance benchmarking we have done on the trie and the DFA.

RabbitMQ 2.4.0 introduced an extension that allows publishers to specify multiple routing keys in the CC and BCC message headers. The BCC header is removed from the message prior to delivery. Direct and topic exchanges are the only standard exchange types that make use of routing keys, therefore the routing logic of this feature only works with these exchange types.

I decided to run some benchmarks of my AMQP encoder/decoder (AMQ Protocol gem) against the old one in the AMQP gem to see whether it performs better or not. So far I did only the most basic optimisations like storing reusable values in constants, nothing special (yet).

I did two sets of benchmarks: CPU time benchmarking using my fork of RBench with support for custom formatters (like writing results into a YAML file) and memory benchmarking using Object.count_objects (Ruby 1.9).

In many messaging scenarios, you must not lose messages.  Since AMQP gives few guarantees regarding message persistence/handling, the traditional way to do this is with transactions, which can be unacceptably slow.  To remedy this problem, we introduce an extension to AMQP in the form of Lightweight Publisher Confirms.

RabbitMQ 2.3.1 introduces a couple of new plugin mechanisms, allowing you much more control over how users authenticate themselves against Rabbit, and how we determine what they are authorised to do. There are three questions of concern here:

1. How does the client prove its identity over the wire?
2. Where do users and authentication information (e.g. password hashes) live?
3. Where does permission information live?

Question 1 is answered in the case of AMQP by SASL - a simple protocol for pluggable authentication mechanisms that is embedded within AMQP (and various other protocols). SASL lets a client and a server negotiate and use an authentication mechanism, without the "outer" protocol having to know any of the details about how authentication works.

SASL offers a number of "mechanisms". Since the beginning, RabbitMQ has supported the PLAIN mechanism, which basically consists of sending a username and password over the wire in plaintext (of course possibly the whole connection might be protected by SSL). It's also supported the variant AMQPLAIN mechanism (which is conceptually identical to PLAIN but slightly easier to implement if you have an AMQP codec lying around). RabbitMQ 2.3.1 adds a plugin system allowing you to add or configure more mechanisms, and we've written an example plugin which implements the SASL EXTERNAL mechanism.

From time to time, on our mailing list and elsewhere, the idea comes up of using a different backing store within RabbitMQ. The backing store is the bit that's responsible for writing messages to disk (a message can be written to disk for a number of reasons) and it's a fairly frequent suggestion to see what RabbitMQ would look like if its own backing store was replaced with another storage system.

Such a change would permit functionality that is not currently possible, for example out-of-band queue browsing, or distributed storage, but there is a fundamental difference in the nature of data storage and access patterns between a message broker such as RabbitMQ and a generic database. Indeed RabbitMQ deliberately does not store messages in such a database.