Federated Exchanges
Here is a diagram showing a single federated exchange in one broker linking to a set of two upstream exchanges in other brokers.
All of the configuration needed to establish the upstream links and the federated exchange is in the broker with the federated exchange.
To prevent messages being continually copied and re-routed (in a never-ending cycle) there is a limit placed on the number of times a message can be copied over a link (see max-hops below). It is recommended that all the exchanges linked by federation are of the same type. Mixing types will lead to strange routing behaviour.
Another use would be to implement massive fanout - a single “root” exchange in one broker (which need not be federated) can be declared as upstream by many other federated exchanges in other brokers. In turn, each of these can be upstream for many more exchanges, and so on.
See the example diagrams below for some possible arrangements.
Implementation
Inter-broker communication is implemented using AMQP (optionally secured with SSL). Bindings are grouped together and bind / unbind commands are sent to the upstream exchange. Therefore the federated exchange only receives messages for which it has a subscription. The bindings are sent upstream asynchronously - so the effect of adding or removing a binding is only guaranteed to be seen eventually.
The messages are buffered in a queue created in the upstream exchange’s broker. This is called the upstream queue. It is the upstream queue which is bound to the upstream exchange with the grouped bindings. It is possible to tailor some of the properties of this queue in the upstream configuration.
Here is a detailed diagram showing a single federated exchange linking to a single upstream exchange including the upstream queue and bindings created by the federation plugin shown in grey. The fat arrow on the upstream link indicates messages republished by the federated exchange. Some potential publisher clients are shown publishing to both exchanges.
Publications to either exchange may be received by queues bound to the federated exchange, but publications directly to the federated exchange cannot be received by queues bound to the upstream exchange.
Example topologies
We illustrate some example federation topologies. Where RabbitMQ brokers are shown in these diagrams (indicated by a ) it is possible to have a cluster of brokers instead.
Both links are declared with max-hops=1 so that messages are copied only once, otherwise the consumers will see multiple copies of the same message (up to the max-hops limit).
Again max-hops=1 because the “hop distance” to any other exchange is exactly one. This will be the case in any complete graph of federated exchanges.
Because there are no loops it is not as crucial to get the max-hops value right, but it must be at least as large as the longest connecting path. For a tree this is the number of levels minus one.
This topology, though relatively cheap in queues and connections, is rather fragile compared to a completely connected graph. One broker (or connection) failure breaks the ring.