> Was it easy to setup in terms of reliability and failover?
To be honest, the current setup was set up by colleagues who have even less experience than me and it's still running flawlessly. Iirc, it's just two instances that are behind a load balancer and the consumer just consumes from both, but I'm not super certain on that.
I've tested the cluster functionality to see how to set it up and it worked fine for me, but I have no experience with that in production, but other people in this thread don't seem to be too happy with it, so ymmv.
> Is there anything I should keep in mind for running it in production?
Nothing special that you wouldn't do otherwise, when getting to know a new component/microservice. Just check out the get started section[1] on their page in the appropriate language and play around with a small setup. Get familiar with the libraries to connect and send/queue/fetch stuff and the topics. Make sure to use your brainpower before you set it up to handle all eventualities and is set up exactly how you want it to act (ACK/NACK, what happens if a sender/consumer dies, etc.), because then you set it up once and probably never touch it again.
One thing I'm not really sure on and what I haven't really answered myself yet: there might be some "logic" to your RabbitMQ instance, depending on which metadata you add to each message (e.g. retries). If you have such logic, it might be better to have a service around the RabbitMQ instance, otherwise this logic ends up in your code base of you actual solution and that might not be wanted and maybe harder to maintain. But I'm not so sure myself on that one.
Oh yeah, and check out some patterns for your needs. There are for example multiple ways to implement retries, for example with a queue for queues, etc. But if you API is REST based, everything should be straightforward.
We use it in a fairly big scale for our slack bot system. It was just set up once, as akyu said, and since then it just works. Whenever we had troubles, it was always anything other than RabbitMQ.
I've also looked into other solutions (ActiveMQ, Google PubSub, ...) and RabbitMQ is by far the most straight-forward and quick to set up. There are some edge cases that it doesn't cover as well, for example automatic retries, but there are some "RabbitMQ patterns" to make it work. For a simple message broker/queue system, it's great and the docs are also great.
Reminds me a little bit of Vivaldi's Tab Stacking feature [0]. Yet, it looks less useful, especially for tab hoarders as mentioned in the other comments here. But progress is progress and maybe we'll end up with something better than the Tab Stacks in the end.
To be honest, the current setup was set up by colleagues who have even less experience than me and it's still running flawlessly. Iirc, it's just two instances that are behind a load balancer and the consumer just consumes from both, but I'm not super certain on that.
I've tested the cluster functionality to see how to set it up and it worked fine for me, but I have no experience with that in production, but other people in this thread don't seem to be too happy with it, so ymmv.
> Is there anything I should keep in mind for running it in production?
Nothing special that you wouldn't do otherwise, when getting to know a new component/microservice. Just check out the get started section[1] on their page in the appropriate language and play around with a small setup. Get familiar with the libraries to connect and send/queue/fetch stuff and the topics. Make sure to use your brainpower before you set it up to handle all eventualities and is set up exactly how you want it to act (ACK/NACK, what happens if a sender/consumer dies, etc.), because then you set it up once and probably never touch it again.
One thing I'm not really sure on and what I haven't really answered myself yet: there might be some "logic" to your RabbitMQ instance, depending on which metadata you add to each message (e.g. retries). If you have such logic, it might be better to have a service around the RabbitMQ instance, otherwise this logic ends up in your code base of you actual solution and that might not be wanted and maybe harder to maintain. But I'm not so sure myself on that one.
Oh yeah, and check out some patterns for your needs. There are for example multiple ways to implement retries, for example with a queue for queues, etc. But if you API is REST based, everything should be straightforward.
[1]: https://www.rabbitmq.com/getstarted.html