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RabbitMQ on Heroku

· 3 min read
Alexis Richardson

We are very pleased to announce the availability in beta of RabbitMQ as a Heroku add-on. With our RabbitMQ service on CloudFoundry, this extends our commitment to supporting the community of cloud application developers.

We believe that cloud messaging is fundamental in two senses. First as a core capability to build applications that scale to cloud use cases as explained in our blog post launching RabbitMQ on CloudFoundry. And second, because messaging can be extended to solve common problems like integration and data push. For example: to connect traditional on-premise applications with virtualized and cloud deployments.

Why offer RabbitMQ as a service​

As we talked to more and more customers about this, what stood out was that people want more than "it just works". They also want "it's just there". In other words people want ubiquity, and convenience.

Thus it made sense for us to move beyond offering RabbitMQ as a product that you install and manage for every application instance. RabbitMQ is now also a platform service. That means it is installed and operated by us to save you the overhead and worry of managing all your Rabbits yourself.

A big thank-you to Rapportive​

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the excellent Rapportive team, who have helped us roadtest RabbitMQ on Heroku.

Sam Stokes, CTO of Rapportive, has kindly provided us with the following testimonial: "RabbitMQ has been instrumental in scaling Rapportive. We now serve our users 65 million contact profiles per month."

He goes on to say: "RabbitMQ holds Rapportive together: it delivers requests to our highly concurrent web-crawling engine, routes log entries for analytics, and lets us perform long-running operations without tying up our web servers. We ask it to juggle billions of messages every month and it hasn't broken a sweat. The RabbitMQ Heroku addon has saved us the weeks of effort we'd have had to spend maintaining a RabbitMQ instance. We've come to depend on their responsive support and domain expertise; they've even given us tips to improve our application code!"

We look forward to seeing Rapportive go from strength to strength.

The first open cloud messaging service​

RabbitMQ and the Rabbit service demonstrate the power of "open PaaS" as described by VMware's CTO Steve Herrod in a blog post last year. In the open PaaS, platform services, eg queues and notifications, do not limit developers to just one cloud.

By offering the same RabbitMQ service on instances of CloudFoundry as well as on Heroku, we provide developers with convenience via a familiar programming model on multiple clouds. That delivers choice because messaging is available in the same place a developer chooses to deploy their application.

And because RabbitMQ is open source, developers can set up their own messaging capability for testing, or on their own servers behind the firewall. This delivers a complete, consistent and portable deployment model.

Getting started​

Heroku applications that use RabbitMQ may be built on any language supported on the Heroku cloud. In this blog post, Morten Bagai introduces the steps required to build a first application. If you would like to try the add-on and are not on the Heroku beta tester program please contact us.

And: if you are at Dreamforce this week, please go and talk to Jerry Kuch in the Developer Zone, who can show you the service.

If you write a cool application, please tell us about it. We'll maintain a list of examples to show case the service, as we are doing with CloudFoundry.