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by cssanchez 1436 days ago
I've read of RABBITMQ so much, but yet I don't understand what does it actually do? I know it is a 'message broker' but I don't understand what that means. To me it sounds it's a backend for messaging that's easy to integrate with any user account module?
2 comments

It's messaging in the sense of message passing between processes. You put messages into it when you want them to be processed asynchronously.

They go into queues based on attributes of the messages ("routing keys") matched against rules you set up ("bindings").

Other things pick up messages off of those queues and process them.

When they're done, they acknowledge the message and it's removed from the queue. If they crash, the message doesn't get acknowledged and it goes back to the queue.

I think of it is as the nervous system of our infrastructure. Our infra has all these moving parts like schedulers, storage, virtual machines, networking and so on. Rabbit is the thing that all the moving parts use to coordinate with all the other moving parts.