Open Source Journal

VMware is making a public beta of the open source RabbitMQ messaging system part of Cloud Foundry, its equally free, open source, and still-in-beta PaaS, encouraging developers to use the thing as a service to create and connect to cloud applications because messaging is a cloud enabler," a theory it shares with NASA, which uses RabbitMQ in its Nebula IaaS.

See, messaging is fundamentally a communication technology and "in the cloud, communication is the design center."

According to a VMware blog, "Messaging is essential for successful cloud applications for two reasons."

"First, it provides stable communication patterns that scale across multiple network topologies. In the cloud it is critical for applications to cope when networks change or grow. This means that the constituent components of cloud applications cannot be coupled directly. Instead, asynchronous decoupling and indirection based on message brokers is used. These two patterns enable work to be addressed, routed and delivered between components. Those components may be running in one cloud, or several, or on multiple devices, e.g., phones. RabbitMQ has a proven track record of moving a lot of data reliably in these scenarios at scale. Second, because those components are likely to be written in multiple programming languages, it is necessary that communication be ‘polyglot' and therefore ‘data centric.'"

VMware says RabbitMQ on Cloud Foundry is a cloud-based message broker, "a type of server software that is used to integrate distinct software systems, by sending and receiving data (in the form of messages) between those systems. These systems can be components of the same application, or part of distinct applications, and can reside on the same machine (physical or virtual), on different machines in the same datacenter, or can be physically remote."

VMware bought RabbitMQ creator Rabbit Technologies last year and has previously used the widgetry in vFabric.

It is joining MySQL, MongoDB and Redis on Cloud Foundry.