Skip to main content

RabbitMQ on Hikube

Hikube RabbitMQ clusters provide a reliable, managed messaging infrastructure, designed for asynchronous communication between services and applications. Based on the AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) protocol, RabbitMQ ensures safe and ordered message delivery, suited both to microservices architectures and to complex business integration systems.

You create and manage your clusters as self-service from the Hikube console, in the DB & Messaging → RabbitMQ menu of your project.

What the console lets you do​

  • Create a cluster with a guided wizard: RabbitMQ version, resource preset, disk size, number of replicas and external access;
  • Define the virtual hosts (vhosts) and users at creation time, then manage them from the cluster page;
  • Assign rights per vhost to each user (Administrator or Read-only);
  • Generate a new password for a user;
  • Edit an existing cluster: version upgrade, disk size increase, external access;
  • Restart a cluster;
  • Delete a cluster, a vhost or a user.

Architecture and operation​

A RabbitMQ deployment relies on a few fundamental concepts:

  • Producers: send messages to RabbitMQ through exchanges, which determine how messages are routed to queues.
  • Exchanges: apply routing logic (direct, fanout, topic or headers) to distribute messages according to routing keys.
  • Queues: store messages until they are consumed by consumers.
  • Consumers: retrieve and process messages, ensuring an asynchronous, reliable and decoupled workflow.

A cluster can run in standalone mode (1 replica) or in cluster mode (3 or 5 replicas). In cluster mode, quorum queues (based on the Raft protocol) replicate messages between nodes to keep the service running if a node fails. The details are covered in the concepts.

Typical use cases​

Inter-service communication​

RabbitMQ is often used as an internal message bus between applications or microservices. It lets you decouple processing, reduce perceived latency and improve overall resilience.

Examples:

  • Processing queue for long-running tasks (emails, reports, notifications)
  • Business event system (orders, payments, inventories)
  • Reliable communication between distributed microservices

Asynchronous flow management​

RabbitMQ simplifies setting up asynchronous workflows in which each component works independently of the others.

Examples:

  • Orchestration of background jobs
  • Parallel processing of data batches
  • Coordination of CI/CD pipelines or internal automations

Application integration and system interconnection​

RabbitMQ acts as a communication bridge between heterogeneous applications, languages or environments.

Examples:

  • Integration between legacy applications and modern microservices
  • Connection between internal systems and external platforms via AMQP
  • Centralization of business event messages on a single bus

Reliability and persistence​

RabbitMQ ensures message durability through on-disk persistence and the handling of acknowledgements (ACK/NACK). Combined with quorum queues on a cluster of 3 or more replicas, these mechanisms prevent message loss if a node fails.

Examples:

  • Transactional queue for critical processing
  • Guaranteed processing of financial or logistics messages
  • Data transfer between services with automatic recovery after an error