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:
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.
I'm happy to announce that the AMQP 0.7 is released, as I promised in the previous blog post. So what are the changes?
We have been prototyping support for a new protocol, as is our wont. This one is called "AMQP 1.0 R0", and it is the new issue from the AMQP working group (of which RabbitMQ, and latterly VMware, are a member). The "R0" indicates that it's the first revision of a recommendation. The specification is incomplete: there are many TODOs, and to a large extent it is unproven. Those two facts are part of what prompted this prototyping.
The prototype code is mirrored at github: http://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-amqp1.0. It is built just the same as all our plugins.
The AMQP 1.0 R0 specification differs from the specification of previous versions of AMQP, in that it does not define a broker model; i.e., it doesn't define exchanges queues and bindings, or their equivalents. The protocol is really only about transferring messages from one agent to another, and then agreeing on what the outcome was. That means it is amenable to bolting on to a message broker implementation, among other uses -- the idea is that one can adapt an existing model to suit.
In our case, the incumbent model is that of AMQP 0-9-1, with some generalisations and extensions (for example, chained bindings). Our target with the prototype is therefore to be able to get something useful done with both 1.0 clients and 0-9-1 clients connected at the same time.
Well, the good news is, we've achieved that. In fact the plugin can be set up to replace Rabbit's usual network listener, and will happily talk to AMQP 0-8, 0-9-1, and 1.0 clients. We did have to do some invention along the way, and there are some parts of the specification that we are conspicuously not implementing. These will be detailed in the README soon.
One large part of the invention is to fill in semantics where the specification is silent. Some of these are detailed in this client-broker protocol work we did for the AMQP working group. We're hoping the prototyping will help fill this out some more.
Next week I'll be taking our prototype to the AMQP 1.0 "Connectathon", where it'll be tested against other implementations of the core protocol (not all of which are open source). Again, this will help to flush out barriers to interoperability in the specification.
Arriving in RabbitMQ 2.1.1, is support for bindings between exchanges. This is an extension of the AMQP specification and making use of this feature will (currently) result in your application only functioning with RabbitMQ, and not the myriad of other AMQP 0-9-1 broker implementations out there. However, this extension brings a massive increase to the expressivity and flexibility of routing topologies, and solves some scalability issues at the same time.
Normal bindings allow exchanges to be bound to queues: messages published to an exchange will, provided the various criteria of the exchange and its bindings are met, pass through the various bindings and be appended to the queue at the end of each binding. That's fine for a lot of use cases, but there's very little flexibility there: it's always just one hop -- the message being published to one exchange, with one set of bindings, and consequently one possible set of destinations. If you need something more flexible then you'd have to resort to publishing the same message multiple times. With exchange-to-exchange bindings, a message published once, can flow through any number of exchanges, with different types, and vastly more sophisticated routing topologies than previously possible.
Recently, Michael Bridgen and I implemented a bridge to connect the RabbitMQ broker with applications using 0MQ for messaging.
Here it is: http://github.com/rabbitmq/rmq-0mq
So: What kind of benefit the users can get by using both products in parallel?
The previously mentioned management plugin is now in a state where it's worth looking at and testing. In order to make this easy, I've made a special once-only binary release just for the management plugin (in future we'll make binary releases of it just like the other plugins). Download all the .ez files from here and install them as described here, then let us know what you think. (Update 2010-09-22: Note that the plugins referenced in this blog post are for version 2.0.0 of RabbitMQ. We've now released 2.1.0 - for this and subsequent versions you can get the management plugin from here).
Some three and a half years after we launched RabbitMQ, we have this week released RabbitMQ 2.0.
This means some big changes. The most important of these is our new Scalable Storage Engine. RabbitMQ has always provided persistence for failure recovery. But now, you can happily push data into Rabbit regardless of how much data is already stored, and you don't need to worry about slow consumers disrupting processing. As the demands on your application grow, Rabbit can scale with you, in a stable, reliable way.
Before introducing RabbitMQ 2.0, let me reiterate that as Rabbit evolves you can count on the same high level of commitment to you as a customer or end user, regardless of whether you are a large enterprise, or a next-gen start-up, or an open source community. As always, get in touch if you need help or commercial support.
For a long time the management and monitoring capabilities built into RabbitMQ have consisted of rabbitmqctl. While it's a reasonable tool for management (assuming you like the command line), rabbitmqctl has never been very powerful as a monitoring tool. So we're going to build something better.
Since the beginning, RabbitMQ has implemented the 0-8 version of the AMQP specification. This was the first publicly-available version, but there's been plenty of development since then. In particular, we've wanted to support the 0-9-1 version of AMQP for a while now.