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IronMQ vs ZeroMQ: What are the differences?
Introduction:
IronMQ and ZeroMQ are both messaging technologies but have distinct differences that cater to different use cases. Understanding these differences is crucial for choosing the appropriate technology for your specific needs.
Communication Pattern: IronMQ is a cloud-based message queue service that facilitates communication between different components of an application through its centralized cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, ZeroMQ is a lightweight messaging library that focuses on enabling messaging between components within a single application or network.
Delivery Guarantees: IronMQ guarantees message delivery and persistence by storing messages in the cloud, ensuring that messages are not lost even in the event of network failures. In contrast, ZeroMQ does not provide built-in persistence mechanisms, requiring users to handle message persistence and delivery assurance at the application level.
Scaling Capabilities: IronMQ offers easy horizontal scaling by allowing users to increase message throughput by adding more instances to handle incoming messages. ZeroMQ, on the other hand, is a library that offers high-performance messaging within the same application or network without providing built-in features for seamless horizontal scaling.
Ease of Use: IronMQ's cloud-based infrastructure simplifies setup and maintenance processes by handling message queue administration in the cloud, reducing the burden on application developers. In comparison, ZeroMQ requires developers to manage message queuing and communication logic within their applications, which can be more complex and time-consuming.
Programming Language Support: ZeroMQ supports a wide range of programming languages, making it a versatile choice for developers working with diverse tech stacks. In contrast, IronMQ's language support may be limited to specific programming languages, potentially restricting developers who require compatibility with less common languages.
Customization and Control: ZeroMQ provides extensive customization options and fine-grained control over messaging patterns, making it suitable for developers who require precise control over their messaging architecture. IronMQ, being a cloud-based service, may offer less flexibility in terms of customization and control compared to the self-hosted ZeroMQ solution.
In Summary, IronMQ is a cloud-based message queue service with built-in delivery guarantees and scaling capabilities, while ZeroMQ is a lightweight messaging library focused on high-performance messaging within a single application or network, offering extensive customization but requiring developers to manage message persistence and scalability at the application level.
Hi, we are in a ZMQ set up in a push/pull pattern, and we currently start to have more traffic and cases that the service is unavailable or stuck. We want to: * Not loose messages in services outages * Safely restart service without losing messages (ZeroMQ seems to need to close the socket in the receiver before restart manually)
Do you have experience with this setup with ZeroMQ? Would you suggest RabbitMQ or Amazon SQS (we are in AWS setup) instead? Something else?
Thank you for your time
ZeroMQ is fast but you need to build build reliability yourself. There are a number of patterns described in the zeromq guide. I have used RabbitMQ before which gives lot of functionality out of the box, you can probably use the worker queues example from the tutorial, it can also persists messages in the queue.
I haven't used Amazon SQS before. Another tool you could use is Kafka.
Both would do the trick, but there are some nuances. We work with both.
From the sound of it, your main focus is "not losing messages". In that case, I would go with RabbitMQ with a high availability policy (ha-mode=all) and a main/retry/error queue pattern.
Push messages to an exchange, which sends them to the main queue. If an error occurs, push the errored out message to the retry exchange, which forwards it to the retry queue. Give the retry queue a x-message-ttl and set the main exchange as a dead-letter-exchange. If your message has been retried several times, push it to the error exchange, where the message can remain until someone has time to look at it.
This is a very useful and resilient pattern that allows you to never lose messages. With the high availability policy, you make sure that if one of your rabbitmq nodes dies, another can take over and messages are already mirrored to it.
This is not really possible with SQS, because SQS is a lot more focused on throughput and scaling. Combined with SNS it can do interesting things like deduplication of messages and such. That said, one thing core to its design is that messages have a maximum retention time. The idea is that a message that has stayed in an SQS queue for a while serves no more purpose after a while, so it gets removed - so as to not block up any listener resources for a long time. You can also set up a DLQ here, but these similarly do not hold onto messages forever. Since you seem to depend on messages surviving at all cost, I would suggest that the scaling/throughput benefit of SQS does not outweigh the difference in approach to messages there.
Pros of IronMQ
- Great Support12
- Heroku Add-on8
- Push support3
- Delayed delivery upto 7 days3
- Super fast2
- Language agnostic2
- Good analytics/monitoring2
- Ease of configuration2
- GDPR Compliant2
Pros of ZeroMQ
- Fast23
- Lightweight20
- Transport agnostic11
- No broker required7
- Low level APIs are in C4
- Low latency4
- Open source1
- Publish-Subscribe1
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Cons of IronMQ
- Can't use rabbitmqadmin1
Cons of ZeroMQ
- No message durability5
- Not a very reliable system - message delivery wise3
- M x N problem with M producers and N consumers1
