In modern cloud environments, communication needs to be efficient and reliable. A variety of open source tools are available to manage messaging between services, offering robust and scalable solutions. Among them, RabbitMQ stands out for its popularity, flexibility, and proven scalability, making it a perfect fit for the OpenNebula ecosystem.

As a solid open source message broker, RabbitMQ acts as a middle layer that enables asynchronous, decoupled communication across distributed systems. In this article, we’ll explore how RabbitMQ has been integrated into OpenNebula through our Community Marketplace, enhancing your cloud infrastructure with powerful messaging capabilities.

What is the OpenNebula Community Marketplace?

The Community Marketplace gives OpenNebula users and developers the ability to share their own appliances—ready-to-use virtual machines that can be deployed in just a few clicks. Unlike the official Marketplace, these are community-made, often more experimental or tailored for specific use cases.

It’s a great way to share new tools and collaborate on useful solutions. That’s what we did with the RabbitMQ OneApp, a lightweight appliance to get RabbitMQ up and running fast on any OpenNebula setup.

If you’d like to learn more about the OpenNebula Community Marketplace and how to contribute, feel free to check out the official repository.

Why Use RabbitMQ on OpenNebula?

RabbitMQ is a lightweight message broker used to support reliable, asynchronous communication between microservices and distributed applications. It supports a wide range of messaging protocols, advanced routing, and high availability out of the box.

With the increasing shift toward event-driven architectures, having a robust messaging layer is critical. With OpenNebula, you can now deploy RabbitMQ in seconds thanks to our new RabbitMQ OneApp. Whether you are building real-time analytics pipelines, integrating IoT systems, or decoupling your backend services, RabbitMQ on OpenNebula ensures low-latency communication, fault-tolerance, and scalability.

Benefits and Use Cases

Deploying RabbitMQ as a OneApp in your OpenNebula cloud brings a number of advantages:

• Fast Deployment: Provision RabbitMQ nodes in seconds, either as standalone brokers or as part of a clustered architecture.
• Scalability: Deploy multiple instances and scale horizontally to handle increasing message throughput.
• Edge-Ready: Lightweight and easily configurable, RabbitMQ can run in edge environments where low-latency message passing is critical.

How to Use RabbitMQ Appliance

If you haven’t already, the first step is to import the Community Marketplace into your OpenNebula environment.

The appliance is built on the latest RabbitMQ release for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and enables users to deploy configurations with TLS support. Notably, if a user doesn’t provide a TLS certificate, the appliance will automatically generate new certificates.

Users can import the RabbitMQ appliance from the Marketplace into their OpenNebula cloud deployment.

After importing the RabbitMQ OneApp, users can instantiate VMs from the new VM Template “RabbitMQ”.

The RabbitMQ deployment can be customized by providing additional configuration parameters such as user credentials or TLS certificates. For detailed setup and configuration instructions, refer to the community repository documentation:

After this, the RabbitMQ appliance will be automatically deployed based on the provided configuration, making it ready for use in just a few minutes.

Conclusions

This new RabbitMQ service appliance shows the power of OpenNebula’s Marketplace to deliver production-ready services in a simple, reliable way. By combining the flexibility of RabbitMQ with the simplicity of OneApp deployment, we can deploy scalable messaging infrastructures in any OpenNebula environment.

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🇪🇺 This development is a result of OpenNebula’s collaboration with The Universitat Rovira i Virgili on the CLOUDLESS innovation project (URV.N01.05.01 SE 22/23), aimed at supporting Function-as-a-Service environments across a distributed cloud-edge continuum. Funded by NextGenerationEU and the Spanish Government through the UNICO I+D Cloud program.