I'm trying to get a deep understand how works the Push API communication between the client and the RabbitMQ server.
As I know - but correct me in case - the client open a TCP connenction to the broker (RabbitMQ) and keep this connenction alive until the client decision to close it. But during this connection the client can get messages immediately.
My question is, during this connection, do the client monitor the Broker to ask him for messages, or when the Broker forward a message to the Queue, where the client subscribed, just take that connencion and push the data to the client?
first case: client monitor the broker for messages
last case: client don't need to monitor the broker, broker just push the data
or other?
There are two options to receive messages
The client registers a consumer callback (basicConsume) on the channel; the broker then "pushes" messages to the consumer.
The client sends the broker a basicGet and receives one message (if present).
The first use case is the most common.
Since you tagged the question with spring-amqp I assume you are interested in Spring. For the first case, Spring AMQP has a listener container (and #RabbitListener annotation); for the second case, one of the RabbitTemplate receive operations can be used.
I suggest you look at the tutorials to get a basic understanding. They cover several languages including pure java and Spring AMQP.
You can also look at the Spring AMQP Reference Manual.
Related
How does Rebus ensure that a requester gets the response destined for the requester from the server?
The context is a setup with multiple clients, one backend server and two azure servicebus queues one for the client side and one for the server side. One client's response must not be received by another client.
My concern is that Rebus doesn't support sessions on azure service bus.
How does Rebus ensure that a requester gets the response destined for the requester from the server?
Rebus replies back to the queue specified with the rbs2-return-address header in the request, so if you have multiple instances consuming messages from that queue, then the reply will likely not be received by the original sender.
That's pretty much how it works, so it's important that all Rebus instances that consume messages from the same queue have the same capabilities. This implies that e.g. keeping in-mem, non-distributed state in a process that may receive replies from requests sent by other Rebus instance is a no-go.
If you describe the problem you're trying to solve, then maybe I can give you some inspiration on how to solve it.
I am developing a cloud-based back-end HTTP service that will be exposed for integration with some on-prem systems. Client systems are custom-made by external vendors, they are back-end systems with their own databases. These systems are deployed in companies of our clients, we don't have access to them and don't control them. We are providing vendors our API specifications and they implement client code.
The data format which my service exchanges with clients is based on XML and follows a certain standard. Vendors implement their client systems in different programming languages and new vendors will appear over time. I want as many of clients to be able to work with my service as possible.
Most of my service API is REST-like: it receives HTTP requests, processes them, and sends back HTTP responses.
Additionally, my service accumulates some data state changes and needs to regularly push this data to client systems. Because of the below limitations, this use-case does not seem to fit the traditional client-server HTTP request-response model.
Due to the nature of the business, the client systems cannot afford to have their own HTTP API endpoints open and so my service can't establish an outbound HTTP connection to them for delivering data state notifications. I.e. use of WebHooks is not an option.
At the same time my service stakeholders need recorded acknowledgment that data state notifications were accepted by the client system, therefore fire-and-forget systems like Amazon SNS don't seem to apply.
I was considering few approaches to this problem but I'm not sure if I'm missing some simple options or some technologies that already address the problem. Hence this question.
The question text updated: options moved to my own answer.
Related questions and resources
REST API with active push notifications from server to client
Is ReST over websockets possible?
Can we use Web-Sockets for Communication between Microservices?
What is difference between grpc and websocket? Which one is more suitable for bidirectional streaming connection?
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/02/sse-websockets-data-flow-http2/
I eventually found answers to my question myself and with some help from my team. For people like me who come here with a question "how do I arrange notifications delivery from my service to its clients" here's an overview of available options.
WebHooks
This is when the client opens endpoint iself. The service calls client's endpoints whenever the service has some notification to deliver. This way the client also acts as a service and so the client and the service swap roles during notification delivery.
With WebHooks the client must be able to open the endpoint with a well-known address. This is complicated if the client's software is working behind NAT or firewall or if the client is Browser or a mobile application.
The service needs to be prepared that client's WebHook endpoints may not always be online and may not always be healthy.
Another issue is flow control: special measures should be taken in the service not to overwhelm the client with high volume of connections, requests and/or data.
Polling
In this case the client is still the client and the service is still the service, unlike WebHooks. The service offers an endpoint where the client can continuously request new notifications. The advantage of this option is that it does not change connection direction and request-response direction and so it works well with HTTP-based services.
The caveat is that polling API should have some rich semantics to be reasonably reliable if loss of notifications is not acceptable. Good examples could be Google Pub/Sub pull and Amazon SQS.
Here are few considerations:
Receiving and deleting notification should be separate operations. Otherwise, if the service deletes notification just before giving it to the client and the client fails to process the notification, the notification will be lost forever. When deletion operation is separate from receiving, the client is forced to do deletion explicitly which normally happens after successful processing.
In case the client received the notification and has not yet deleted it, it might be undesirable to let the same notification to be processed by some other actor (perhaps a concurrent process of the same client). Therefore the notification must be hidden from receiving after it was first received.
In case the client failed to delete the notification in reasonable time because of error, network loss or process crash, the service has to make notification visible for receiving again. This is retry mechanism which allows the notification to be ultimately processed.
In case the service has no notifications to deliver, it should block the client's call for some time by not delivering empty response immediately. Otherwise, if the client polls in a loop and response comes immediately, the loop iteration will be short and clients will make excessive requests to the service increasing network, parsing load and requests counts. A nice-to have feature is for the service to unblock and respond to the client as soon as some notification appears for delivery. This is sometimes called "long polling".
HTTP Server-sent Events
With HTTP Server-sent Events the client opens HTTP connection and sends a request to the service, then the service can send multiple events (notifications) instead of a single response. The connection is long-living and the service can send events as soon as they are ready.
The downside is that the communication is one-way, the client has no way to inform the service if it successfully processed the event. Because this feedback is absent, it may be difficult for the service to control the rate of events to prevent overwhelming the client.
WebSockets
WebSockets were created to enable arbitrary two-way communication and so this is viable option for the service to send notifications to the client. The client can also send processing confirmation back to the service.
WebSockets have been around for a while and should be supported by many frameworks and languages. WebSocket connection begins as HTTP 1.1 connection and so WebSockets over HTTPS should be supported by many load balancers and reverse proxies.
WebSockets are often used with browsers and mobile clients and more rarely in service-to-service communication.
gRPC
gRPC is similar to WebSockets in a way that it enables arbitrary two-way communication. The advantage of gRPC is that it is centered around protocol and message format definition files. These files are used for code generation that is essential for client and service developers.
gRPC is used for service-to-service communication plus it is supported for Browser clients with grpc-web.
gRPC is supported on multiple popular programming languages and platforms, yet the support is narrower than for HTTP.
gRPC works on top of HTTP/2 which might cause difficulties with reverse proxies and load balancers around things like TLS termination.
Message queue (PubSub)
Finally, the service and the client can use a message queue as a delivery mechanism for notifications. The service puts notifications on the queue and the client receives them from the queue. A queue can be provided by one of many systems like RabbitMQ, Kafka, Celery, Google PubSub, Amazon SQS, etc. There's a wide choice of queuing systems with different properties and choosing one is a challenge on its own. The queue can also be emulated by using database for example.
It has to be decided between the service and the client who owns the queue, i.e. who pays for it. Either way, the queuing system and the queue should be available whenever the service needs to push notifications to it otherwise notifications will be lost (unless the service buffers them internally, with another queue).
Queues are typically used for service-to-service communication but some technologies also allow Browsers as clients.
It is worth noting that an "implicit" internal queue might be used on the service side in other options listed above. One reason is to prevent loss of notifications when there's no client available to receive them. There are many other good reasons like letting clients handle notifications at their pace, allowing to maximize processing throughput, allowing to handle spiky traffic with fixed capacity.
In this option the queue is used "explicitly" as delivery mechanism, i.e. the service does not put any other mechanism (HTTP, gRPC or WebSocket endpoint) in front of the queue and lets the client receive notifications from the queue directly.
Message passing is popular in organizing microservice communications.
Common considerations
In all options it has to be decided whether the loss of notifications is tolerable for the service, the client and the business. Some simpler technical choices are possible if it is ok to lose notifications due to processing errors, unavailability, etc.
It is valuable to have a monitoring for client processing errors from the service side. This way service owners know which clients are more broken without having to ask them.
If the queue is used (implicitly or explicitly) it is valuable to monitor the length of the queue and the age of the oldest notifications. It lets service owners judge how stale data may be in the client.
In case the delivery of notification is organized in a way that notification gets deleted only after a successful processing by the client, the same notification could be stuck in infinite receive loop when the client fails to process it. Such notification is sometimes called "poison message". Poison messages should be removed by the service or the queuing system to prevent clients being stuck in infinite loop. A common practice is to move poison messages to a special place, sometimes called "dead letter queue", for the later human intervention.
One alternative to WebSockets for the problem of server→client notifications with acks from the client seems to be gRPC.
It supports bidirectional communication between server and client in bidirectional streaming mode.
It works on top of HTTP 2.0. In our case functioning over HTTP ports is essential.
There are client and server generators for multiple popular languages and platforms. A nice thing is that I can share protocol definition file with vendors and can be sure my service and their clients will talk the same language.
Drawbacks:
Not as many languages and platforms are supported compared to HTTP. Alternative C from the question will be more accessible if based on HTTP 1.1. WebSockets have also been around longer and I would expect broader adoption than gRPC.
Not all gRPC implementations seem to currently support XML format for data according to FAQ. In order to transport XML my service and its clients will have to transfer XML message as byte arrays inside of gRPC protobuf message.
With gRPC, TLS termination cannot be done on general-purpose HTTP 1.1 load balancer. An application-layer HTTP/2-aware reverse proxy (load balancer) such as Traefik is required.
There are approaches like this and this to allow HTTP 1.1 compatible protocols but they have their own restrictions like limited amount of available clients or necessary client customizations.
Currently we have a Spring Integration application which accepts HL7 messages. The flow is as follows.
There is a message driven JMS inbound adapter which accepts the messages through ActiveMQ Queue.
Then the message goes through series of transformations and finally ended up in a service activator component to perform necessary business logic.
So far every thing looks good and recently the client requested that they want to have a acknowledgement for each message with the status. There can be two scenarios for a received message
Message executes successfully
Message fails with exception if the required criteria is not satisfied.
So we are thinking of implementing a acknowledgement mechanism which sends the acknowledgement back to the client through the above mentioned ActiveMQ queue or transmit via a tcp port.
Do we have any proven way/ patterns of doing these kind of acknowledgements? Is there any techniques which Spring Integration provides to achive this kind of scenario?
Appreciate your kind reply
Regards,
Keth
See the inbound gateway.
If the sender sets a replyTo header, the reply will be sent there; if not, you can configure a default replyTo destination.
Is it possible to expose a SOAP endpoint via BizTalk that calls another SOAP service without using orchestrations but just maps?
The current solution where orchestrations are being used is very slow (orchestration overhead is greater than 1,5 seconds) and performance gets even worse when it comes to high concurrency. I require a solution for low latency.
While not 100% sure for a SOAP endpoint, I have done this for WCF-BasicHttp, but cannot think of a reason why it would not be possible for SOAP. Various properties get promoted to the message context that would allow you to route a message to a send port, like the SOAP action, the receive port name, etc. Configuring a send port to subscribe to the relevant messages should be trivial. The mapping from the inbound-request to the outbound-request can happen on either the receive port or the send port.
In the case of using a solicit-response send port, the response message coming back would automatically be subscribed to by the originating receive port, assuming it is also two-way. Again, the mapping from the inbound-response to the outbound-response can happen on either the send port or the receive port.
probably is an easy way to do,
What I want to is:
I have a tcp server which listens to the incoming connection.
I would like to be informed somehow when a client connected.
TcpNetServerConnectionFactory has inside such information "Accepted connection ...".
There is TcpConnectionSupport class, however I cannot find a way how to use it. I am looking something similar to subscriber pattern.
Is there some way to do it?
From one side it isn't clear how you want to implement subscriber pattern, if it is a Spring Integration out-of-the-box feature with <int-ip:tcp-inbound-channel-adapter connection-factory="connectionFactory"/>. When the new connection from client is established and client starts to send the data that component will be ready to receive it and convert to the message to send to the channel for further integration flow.
From other side there is an ApplicationEvent infrastructure, and when connection is open, the TcpNetServerConnectionFactory emits TcpConnectionOpenEvent. You can listen to this event using <int-event:inbound-channel-adapter event-types="org.springframework.integration.ip.tcp.connection.TcpConnectionOpenEvent"/>.
And again: it will be a message flow.