Thursday, February 13, 2020

Both message broker and stream store are increasingly becoming cloud technologies rather than on-premise. This enables their integration much more natural as the limits for storage, networking and compute are somewhat relaxed.

This also helps with increasingly maintenance free deployments of their components. The cloud technologies are suited for load balancing, scaling out, ingress control, pod health and proxies that not only adjust to demand but also come with all the benefits of infrastructure best practices

The networking stacks in the host computers have maintained a host centric send and receive functionality for over three decades. Along with the services for file transfers, remote invocations, peer-to-peer networking and packet capture, the networking in the host has supported sweeping changes such as web programming, enterprise computing, IoT, social media applications and cloud computing. The standard established for this networking across vendors was the Open Systems Interconnection model. The seven layers of this model strived to encompass all but the application logic. However, the networking needs from these emerging trends never fully made its feedback to the host networking stack. This article presents the case where a message broker inherently belongs to a layer in the networking stack. Message Brokers have also been deployed as a standalone application on the host supporting Advanced Message Queuing Protocol. Some message brokers have demonstrated extreme performance that has facilitated the traffic on social media.

The message broker supports an observer pattern that allows interested observers to listen from outside the host. When the data unit is no longer packets but messages, it facilitates data transfers in units that are more readable. The packet capture used proxies as a man in the middle which provides little or no disruption to ongoing traffic while facilitating the storage and analysis of packets for the future. Message subscription makes it easier for collection and verification across hosts.

The notion of data capture now changes to the following model:

Network Data subscriber

Message Broker

Stream storage

Tier 2 storage



This facilitates immense analytics directly over the time series database. Separation of analysis stacks implies that the charts and graphs can now be written with any product and on any host.

This way a message broker becomes a networking citizen in the cloud.

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