Pipelines and Competing Consumers in AMQP
Explore how to implement messaging pipelines and the competing consumers pattern in AMQP. Understand point-to-point communication to distribute tasks evenly across multiple workers using RabbitMQ queues, enhancing parallel processing and load balancing in asynchronous systems.
Point-to-point communications and competing consumers
In a peer-to-peer configuration, a pipeline is a very straightforward concept to imagine. With a message broker in the middle, though, the relationships between the various nodes of the system are a little bit harder to understand: the broker itself acts as an intermediary for our communications and, often, we don’t really know who is on the other side listening for messages. For example, when we send a message using AMQP, we don’t deliver it to its destination directly, but instead to an exchange and then to a queue. Finally, it’ll be for the broker to decide where to route the message, based on the rules defined in the exchange, the bindings, and the destination queues.
If we want to implement a pipeline and a task distribution pattern using a system like AMQP, we have to make sure that each message is received by only one consumer, but this is impossible to guarantee if an exchange can potentially be ...