RabbitMQ: Concepts, Business Benefits & How Customers Use It?

Payoda Technology Inc
6 min readJan 9, 2023

In this blog, we will learn about an open-source message broker technology, RabbitMQ.

What is RabbitMQ, and how does it work?

RabbitMQ is an open-source message broker software that uses AMQP to transmit transfer data, meaning RabbitMQ accepts messages from producers and delivers them to consumers. So RabbitMQ is middleware that reduces loads and delivery time on web application servers. It gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages and your messages a safe place to live until they are received through a queue handler.

AMQP — Internet Protocol for Business Messaging

AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) is a messaging protocol that enables complaint-conforming client applications to communicate with complaint-conforming messaging middleware brokers. Messaging brokers receive messages from publishers and forward route them to consumers. AMQP has queues, switches, and bindings, collectively referred to as its entities. These entities help us to translate messages from producer’s producers to consumers.

Basic concepts of RabbitMQ:

RabbitMQ consists of 4 basic components:

  1. Producer
  2. Exchange
  3. Queue
  4. Consumer

Let’s get into details.

1. Producer

Producing means nothing else than sending messages. A program that sends messages is called a Producer.

We send our message from the Publisher. The Publisher connects to RabbitMQ, sends a single message, and then exits.

The Publisher can specify various message attributes (metadata) when publishing a message. RabbitMQ(broker) can consume some of these attributes, but many are consumed only by the Receiver.

2. Exchange

The broker contains two components: Exchange and Queue.

The exchange receives a message from the producer and routes it to zero or more queues. The routing algorithm depends on the Exchange type and the binding rules.

There are the following types of Exchange in RabbitMQ:

  • Direct exchange: Messages are forwarded to a queue only if the value of a certain key (routing key) matches between them.
  • Fanout exchange: When we want to distribute our message so that each queue can receive the message.
  • Topic exchange: Unlike a direct exchange, this uses patterns instead of an exact key.
  • Header exchange: The header’s value is the same as the value specified in the routing key.

3. Queue

A queue is a message store found in RabbitMQ. Although messages flow through RabbitMQ and your applications, they can only be stored within a queue.

A queue is limited only by the memory and disk limits of the host. It is essentially a large message buffer. Many producers can send messages to a queue, and many consumers can attempt to receive data from a queue.

Before a queue can be used, it must be declared. When a queue is declared, it is created if it does not already exist. The declaration has no effect if the queue exists and its attributes match those in the declaration.

4. Recipient

Consume has a similar meaning to Receive. A consumer is a program that primarily waits to receive messages. Our consumer waits for messages from RabbitMQ.

To consume messages, a queue must exist. When a new consumer is added, delivery starts immediately, provided messages are already in the queue.

What RabbitMQ has to offer for business?

Asynchronous messaging

Supports multiple messaging protocols, message queues, delivery confirmations, flexible routing to queues, and multiple exchanges.

Developer experience

Deployment with Docker and Puppet, etc. Development using preferred programming languages such as Java, PHP, Python, JavaScript, and many others.

Distributed deployment

Federation across multiple availability zones and regions; deployment in clusters for high availability and throughput.

Enterprise and cloud-ready

Authorization, support for TLS and LDAP, pluggable authentication. Lightweight and easy to deploy in all clouds.

Tools and plugins

Variety of tools and plugins to support continuous integration, operational metrics, and integration with other enterprise systems. The flexible plugin approach is one of the best approaches to extending RabbitMQ functionality.

Management and monitoring

UI, command line tool, and HTTP-API for managing all things and monitoring RabbitMQ consistently.

That’s pretty much all from this article. If you have any feedback or questions, please let me know in the comments. If you enjoyed the article, please give me a thumbs up, and I will continue to write blogs like this for you in the future. Keep reading and keep programming.

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The RabbitMQ Management Interface

With the help of the user-friendly RabbitMQ Management interface, you can manage and monitor your RabbitMQ server from a web browser. Queues, connections, channels, exchanges, users, and user permissions may all be managed; they can be created, removed, and listed in the browser, among other things. You can manually send/receive messages and keep an eye on messaging rates.

Pageviews available in RabbitMQ Management.

Customers Use Cases in Web/Mobile Application

Instead of making the user wait longer on an app, you can request the job be processed (for instance, by clicking a button on any website to begin transcoding a video file on the server) and send a message to your bus. It lets your backend service take it up when its turn in the queue starts and possibly informs the user that work will start. The user can immediately resume using the application after you hand back control to the UI portion.

In this situation, your web page has zero heavy liftings, giving the user visibility into stages of the process as you see fit. For example, the job could incrementally update database records with the state of the process, which you can query and display to your user more effectively. Let’s say that any web application that experiences reasonable traffic would have this infrastructure, like rabbitMQ. If you’re using cloud service technologies, this type of infrastructure makes it trivial to add additional message handlers to process every job by subscribing to the job queue mentioned in the queue handler and just picking off messages to process and send to users.

Customers Use Cases in IoT Applications

Consider that you have a temperature sensor in your greenhouse that measures the temperature within a specific interval. Your app can send temperature details to a message queue every 15 minutes interval instead of processing the data in the greenhouse and be connected the whole day.

Message queues designed for IoT provide a lightweight publish messaging transport service. Rather than keeping an application running all the time in your greenhouse, you use a queue to send and handle data in another microservice. This requires minimal network bandwidth, which might be limited for your sensor, or if your sensor communicates via satellite link.

Know More,
RabbitMQ, Kafka, and Redis: Which Message Broker to choose for a MicroService?

RabbitMQ and Payoda: How can we help?

Data management systems that integrate well with the current cloud are essential for every company that wants to grow and remain competitive. We hope our blog post about RabbitMQ will help you find the finest solution for enhancing your systems and applications’ distribution, fault tolerance, and monitoring. It is necessary to Hire RabbitMQ developers to assure no data leaks, latency, or miscommunications arise during the communication process.

Talk to our experts at Payoda today!

Authored by: Hariprasad Selvaraj

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Payoda Technology Inc

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