A Rabbit Springs to Life

Messaging or message queuing is a method of communication between applications or components. Thanks to message queues, these applications can remain completely separate as they process their individual tasks. Messages are typically small requests, replies, status updates, or even just information. A message queue provides a temporary place for these messages to stay, allowing applications to send and receive them as necessary.

RabbitMQ is an open source message broker that acts as the intermediary or middleman for independent applications, giving them a common platform to communicate. RabbitMQ mainly uses an Erlang-based implementation of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), which supports advanced features such as clustering and the complex routing of messages.

This chapter includes information about how to get started with RabbitMQ, and why it would benefit an architecture. This book follows a fictitious taxi agency, Complete Car (CC), to demonstrate how they have implemented RabbitMQ into the architecture. This chapter shows how to install and configure RabbitMQ so that it's easy to get everything up and running.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Explaining message queues
• Discovering AMQP and RabbitMQ
• Using RabbitMQ in real life
• Exploring the benefits of message queuing
• A RabbitMQ scenario
• Getting ready for RabbitMQ

Let's get started!