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The article about AMQP we’ve all been waiting for

June 15th, 2007 felix

AMQP is an open messaging protocol intended to support the high-volume, high-reliability applications used in the financial and telecoms industries (among others). Some might see it as the next natural layer to go on top of TCP/IP - that’s as close as I can get to describing it in a single phrase, anyway.

This article about it is quite illuminating:

http://www.acm.org/acmqueue/digital/Queuevol5no4_May2007.pdf

The author is John O’Hara, principal instigator of AMQP and distinguished engineer at JP Morgan, who actually use AMQP-based software for production applications. (Given the ludicrously demanding environment of investment banking, this use-case tells its own story regarding the maturity and reliability of the protocol.)

The article gives a very readable description of AMQP, the design ideas that went into it, and the current state of play as regards available implementations and likely adoption/usage scenarios. To pick a few stand-out points:

(*) Considerable thought has gone into designing the protocol for maximum flexibility, interoperability with existing systems, and ease of adoption. As Mr O’Hara comments, the only “political constraint” (i.e. expedient holdover) that went into the design was compatibility with the already popular JMS messaging standard.

(*) A central idea of AMQP is to decouple the transport and queueing model. The article describes an extended analogy with a nationwide postal service. Outgoing messages, adorned with headers, correspond to labelled envelopes. Exchanges correspond to postboxes acting as a front end to configurable sorting/delivery systems. Queues correspond to holding areas where mail is stored for the addressee to collect. All the machinery in between is user-definable and can be dynamically reconfigured.

(*) There are already several “industry strength” open-source broker/client implementations available. The article describes some plausible, low-risk ways for organizations to experiment with AMQP using these.

(*) A particularly promising development is that the widely used trading protocol FIX may well use AMQP as an underlying transport in its next version. This is an attractive route for the FIX community because of perceived deficiencies in the currently implemented session layer. At a stroke, this would validate AMQP as a next-generation messaging standard and accelerate its adoption by the financial services industry.

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