[cookiecaper]

>they could build a small parts of the system communicating via http/RabbitMQ.

<Cue horrified twitching>

Now, it's totally possible that you're using RMQ completely correctly, but as someone who has seen multiple teams fundamentally misunderstand both the purpose and function of an AMQP server and lose critical data because of it, any mention of RMQ as a primary part of the application's communication mechanism ruffles my feathers.

Sometimes I wonder if the RMQ team is aware of how many people end up using it grossly improperly. It seems they'd put some bigger warning labels on it if they were.

[mafro]

I've not seen this kind of misuse. Could you be specific about the mistakes you've seen?

[cookiecaper]

They inject it into the normal data processing/RPC workflow. Instead of writing to a database or some other permanent storage, they just have the application write directly to a RMQ queue, and wait for a worker to pick it up and store it somewhere.

AMQP is asynchronous and the queues can get choked up, so sometimes messages will be delayed for hours, and if the queues get too large, RMQ will begin to evict messages and/or crash due to insufficient resources.

RMQ will throw all the data in your queue away on restart unless you explicitly ask it not to by setting durable mode (don't forget to do this or all your data is down the hole when you're misusing it this way). Even in durable mode, the queue does not provide the type of safety guarantees would be expected of a real storage solution, which RMQ does not pretend to be, but somehow people still believe it is.

Because RabbitMQ does not provide strong data safety, crash, or resilience guarantees, it should never be the system-of-record for important data.

Furthermore, because the nature of AMQP is to dispose messages as soon as they're picked up (and yes, I know you can use acknowledgements to try to hack around this, but it's not something to trust for the only place where your data is recorded), it's very easy to accidentally black hole messages while everything appears to be working. This can lead to an insidious type of data loss where some records just appear to be mysteriously missing and are very hard to trace.

While RMQ states these things in its documentation and obviously is not intended to be the system of record, people still abuse it in this way. Redis was abused similarly and responded by growing a full featureset to turn it into a reliable in-memory storage solution. It doesn't seem like that's a good track for RMQ to take, so they should stick some giant red warning labels all over their page, clearly embarrassing those who make these dangerous choices.

[mafro]

Thanks for elaborating. Certainly assuming that your data is safe in RMQ is a mistake!