Red Hat Messaging Frequently Asked Questions
- 1. What is Red Hat Messaging?
- 2. What is AMQP?
- 3. If there is an Apache incubator project, why have Red Hat Messaging?
- 4. Why are there two messaging brokers in Red Hat Messaging: a Java broker and a C++ broker?
- 5. What are some of the specific optimizations Red Hat Messaging will have for Linux? Isn't this crippling Red Hat Messaging on other platforms?
- 6. What languages does Red Hat Messaging support? Does it support JMS?
- 7. Is Red Hat Messaging and AMQP used anywhere in production deployment?
- 8. How can I get involved in Red Hat Messaging?
- 9. What are Red Hat's product plans for Red Hat Messaging?
- 10. Can I get early support for Red Hat Messaging?
1. What is Red Hat Messaging?
Red Hat Messaging is an open source, high performance, reliable messaging distribution that implements the AMQP specification. It is based on the Qpid project, currently in incubation at Apache. Red Hat Messaging is hosted at http://rhm.et.redhat.com.
2. What is AMQP?
AMQP stands for Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
and is a specification
for how commodity messaging and middleware works. Its primary aim is to create
an open standard for messaging in order to create open and interoperable
messaging. AMQP defines both a wire-level protocol for messaging (the transport
layer) and the higher-level semantics for messaging (the functional layer). It
is completely free to use and is being developed by the AMQP Working Group. AMQP
is currently in draft and will be submitted to a standards body once it is
completed. For more information, see http://amqp.org.
3. If there is an Apache incubator project, why have Red Hat Messaging?
The Qpid project is an important community project. Red Hat was one of the founding members of the project, created the project proposal, and employs many of the lead committers on Qpid. Red Hat is absolutely committed to Qpid's success. However, just as the work at kernel.org does not encompass all of Red Hat's work in creating a Linux distribution (Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux), so the work at Qpid does not compass all of Red Hat's work in create a messaging distribution. In particular, Red Hat Messaging has several distinguishing features from Qpid:
Red Hat Messaging is creating a full messaging distribution that integrates additional open source projects, some of which use non-Apache licenses and thus cannot be hosted at Apache. These include persistence options and components licensed under the LGPL.
Red Hat is adding kernel optimizations to Linux for messaging and enabling its Linux version of Red Hat Messaging to take advantage of those optimizations for increased performance, reliability, predictability, and quality of service.
Red Hat is enabling Red Hat Messaging to provide operating system services for supporting capabilities like virtualization.
Red Hat Messaging builds upon the work at Qpid to create the leading open source messaging distribution. Red Hat Messaging itself will serve as a stand-alone distribution and also go into Linux distributions like Fedora.
4. Why are there two messaging brokers in Red Hat Messaging: a Java broker and a C++ broker?
Red Hat Messaging is committed to offering messaging on multiple platforms. The Java broker enables Red Hat Messaging to run on a variety of systems, including Windows, Unix, and Linux through Java's cross-platform support. The C++ broker is 100% compatible with the Java broker and primarily runs on Linux. It is necessary to take advantage of optimizations that Red Hat is building into Linux, like real time Linux, asynchronous IO, and DMA.
5. What are some of the specific optimizations Red Hat Messaging will have for Linux? Isn't this crippling Red Hat Messaging on other platforms?
Red Hat Messaging aims to be the leading messaging distribution on ALL platforms—not just Linux. Red Hat Messaging's Java broker delivers the highest performance and reliability across multiple platforms. However, as Linux is adding many features and optimizations that increase messaging performance, and as Linux is itself open source, ensuring that Red Hat Messaging takes advantage of these features makes sense. These features and optimizations include:
Leveraging the real-time work in the Linux kernel to deliver predictable messaging performance
Using the Linux kernel to schedule broker events directly, eliminating context switching
Incorporating the new IO API in the Linux kernel to avoid epoll/select and sockets. This means that IO will become as fast as a memcpy(), and it will enable full DMA IO
Red Hat Messaging is not crippled in any way on non-Linux platforms—there is nothing in the code that degrades performance on other platforms. However, other platforms might not be able to take advantage of synergistic optimizations with Red Hat Messaging due to their being proprietary or not providing the required features.
6. What languages does Red Hat Messaging support? Does it support JMS?Red Hat messaging aims to be language neutral. Currently, it has clients for Java, C++, Python, C#, and Ruby. Perl support is coming soon as well. The Java client supports a JMS interface. The Python & Ruby clients are particularly interesting because they are extremely small and make available full messaging services to a light-weight scripting environment.
7. Is Red Hat Messaging and AMQP used anywhere in production deployment?
Yes, there are already many large-scale production deployments. Although Red Hat Messaging and AMQP are still under active development, they are quite usable, stable, and fast for many use cases. For example, one bank has a world-wide deployment that delivers over 100m messages per day in a 7-hour trading window in its Tokyo hub.
8. How can I get involved in Red Hat Messaging?
There are several ways to get involved in Red Hat Messaging—either directly or indirectly. To contribute to Red Hat Messaging directly, you can contribute code, tests, documentation, and bug reports since it is an open source project (http://rhm.et.redhat.com). Indirectly, you can either join the AMQP working group to work on the AMQP specification or participate in the Qpid open source project.
9. What are Red Hat's product plans for Red Hat Messaging?
Red Hat intends to release a first product around Red Hat Messaging in late 2007. Red Hat will offer subscriptions for Red Hat Messaging as an enterprise distribution just as it does for Red Hat and JBoss enterprise products.
10. Can I get early support for Red Hat Messaging?
Yes. Red Hat is working with strategic early adopters who want to deploy Red Hat Messaging prior to its general availability. With these customers, Red Hat is directly supporting them through its engineering organization and will migrate them to the official product once it is released.
These strategic early adopters, in turn, have the opportunity to provide feedback to Red Hat to ensure that the final product will support their use cases and to take early advantage of AMQP.