Gavin M. Roy - RabbitMQ in Depth

RabbitMQ is an open source message broker written in Erlang, currently under the wing of Pivotal Software. Its based around the AMQP open protocol, with official client libraries in Java, .NET, Erlang, as well as libraries for most other popular programming languages.

This book is up-to-date with RabbitMQ 3.6.3, so with the erratic release schedule of RabbitMQ itself, by the time this book reaches you there may be newer versions released. Not to fret though, as in our experience RabbitMQ has rarely broken features with releases, only added new features and fixed issues!

The code examples used throughout the book are written with Python, but if you dont have a working setup with Python and RabbitMQ, or youd just like to experiment without setting up the whole environment, weve included instructions on setting up a Vagrant box with everything pre-installed. Make sure you check out the appendix for instructions on how to get this up and running first.

looks at the foundation of RabbitMQ: the various features of RabbitMQ itself and the foundation of RabbitMQ, the Advanced Messaging Queuing model.

explores the AMQ protocol, looking at the frame structure, and the low-level process that occurs when a message is published or retrieved from RabbitMQ.

goes even further and looks at the message properties, including the headers that add important meta-data to messages, such as content-type and encoding, and how you can leverage these headers in your applications.

considers performance trade-offs which must be made. With each level of guarantee, your applications risk taking a hit on performance. This chapter explores what these options are and will help you balance your environments need for guaranteed message assurance versus lightning fast delivery, the Goldilocks Principle.

explores the concept of consuming messages, looking at the fundamental difference between Basic.Get and Basic.Consume at a low level (and why the latter is usually better), as well as pre-fetching and Quality of Service, message acknowledgements, dead letter exchanges, temporary queues, and message expiry.

takes an in-depth look into the four core exchange types in RabbitMQ and how they can benefit your application architecture.

looks at how you can scale up RabbitMQ by managing clusters, crash recovery in a cluster, and further performance considerations when working with a clustered environment.

builds on the core concepts of clustering by taking a look at federated exchanges and queues, integrating RabbitMQ clusters with Amazon Web Services, and applying policies.

looks at other ways of talking to RabbitMQ: using MQTT and STOMP as alternative protocols, or using statelessd-based HTTP messaging.

Finally, looks at database integration into both PostgreSQL and InfluxDB for further interesting integrations.

Just about all of the code shown in the book can be found in various forms in the sample source code which accompanies this book. The sample code can be downloaded free of charge from the Manning website (https://www.manning.com/books/rabbitmq-in-depth), as well as from this Github repository: https://github.com/gmr/RabbitMQ-in-Depth.