RabbitMQ vs Redis – Message Brokers, Whats the difference ?. Communication between applications faces a tremendous amount of challenges. These challenges are simplified with the help of messaging middlewares and enable common communication infrastructure to grow and scale and meet the most demanding situations. However, these communications are held in several different forms and there is no difference in the way communication is provided by messaging middleware.
To prevent these challenges, messaging middleware uses a communication method, a server based model using a message broker. With the help of this method, the message is sent by the source application to a server process. It is performed to acquire data marshaling, routing, message translation, persistence, and delivery to every appropriate destination.
There are multiple message brokers to choose from. Among them, the most popular ones are RabbitMQ and Redis. In this blog, we are going to discuss these two in detail and compare them to let you understand the best message broker best on your application requirement.
What is RabbitMQ?
RabbitMQ is a known open source message queue solution, written in Erlang OTP, a technology designed to build stable, reliable, fault tolerant, and highly scalable systems. It helps the systems to possess native capabilities of handling numerous concurrent operations. The extensible message queue is a message broker that supports AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). Moreover, it is reliable with other messaging solutions like MQTT too.
Enabling RabbitMQ at a very very high level allows different services in your application to communicate with each other without worrying about message loss when fulfilling different quality of service (QoS) requirements. It also enables messages to be routed accurately and efficiently and enables applications to be largely separated.
RabbitMQ Features
- Reliability: Increase server performance with reliability, including persistence, delivery acknowledgements, publisher confirms, and high availability.
- Flexible Routing: Offers several built-in exchange types to route messages before arriving at queues.
- Clustering: This will scale the RabbitMQ server among multiple servers.
- Highly Available Queues: Queues can be mirrored across several machines in a cluster, ensuring that even in the event of hardware failure your messages are safe.
- Multi protocol: Supports messaging over a variety of messaging protocols.
- Many Clients: There are lot of RabbitMQ clients available for almost any language you can think of.
- Management UI: RabbitMQ ships with an easy-to use management UI that allows you to monitor and control every aspect of your message broker.
- Plugin System: RabbitMQ ships with a variety of plugins extending it in different ways, and you can also write your own.
Pros of RabbitMQ
- It is highly beneficial for messaging.
- It has the ability of fault tolerance.
- It can be integrated effortlessly.
- It is concurrent and resource utilization.
- It handles dead letter queues and gives the flexibility to create your own dead letter systems.
- It documents internal processes to help you fully understand what you can and cannot do.
- It is extremely flexible.
- It provides accurate performance results.
- It has the ability to interpret the system’s data in a more simple and readable format.
Cons of RabbitMQ
- Issues with processing big amounts of data.
- Needs Erlang.
- It is relatively hard to maintain.
- Non-transactional (by default).
- Becomes a cluster in high traffic environments.
What is Redis?
Redis or Remote Dictionary Server is an advanced NoSQL key value data store. It is used as a database, cache, and messaging medium. It is popular because of its read and writes operations, rich data types, and advanced memory structure. With the help of Redis, you can develop high performance and scalable web applications.
It is often called a data structure server due to its key contain strings, hashes, lists, sets, sort sets, bitmaps, etc. It has the capability of storing the data in memory as well as on the desk or written back to the memory. Organizations that use Redis are Twitter, Github, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat.
Redis Features
- High availability and scalability.
- Data Persistence.
- Rich Data Structures.
- Simplicity.
- Chat and Messaging Applications.
- Chating application’s use cases and respective data structures usage.
- Gaming leaderboard applications.
- Session store
Pros of Redis
- Speed – Since a Redis server stores data in its memory, it works really very fast. It has the ability to perform 110,000 SETs per second and 81000 GETs per second.
- Easy To Set Up – You can effortlessly configure Redis in your system.
- Versatility – Redis is highly versatile. It can be used for caching, messaging queues, and short lived data like web application sessions.
- Provide Atomic Operations – Redis ensures that when two clients access their data concurrently, its server tends to receive an updated value.
- Support Rich Data Types – Redis supports a lot of data types like set, list, sorted set, hashes, and many more.
Cons of Redis
- Limited Memory – Since Redis is an in memory database, the whole dataset resides in the RAM. It can lead to a costly investment if you plan on having a larger dataset.
- Persistence – Redis uses a memory dump to create snapshots that are used for persistence. It impacts the performance and slows down the database.
- Security – Redis has only basic security options. The user using Redis does not get the benefit of access control. They have to look for another authorization layer for such a feature.
- Query And Aggregation – Redis is a key value database that restricts rich queries. There is no built in full text support and modeling relationships with Redis is difficult.
RabbitMQ vs Redis - Differences Between Message Brokers
- RabbitMQ is designed as a dedicated message broker, whereas Redis is a database that you can use as a message broker. Mostly, RabbitMQ outperforms Redis and guarantees message delivery with the help of message durability and acknowledgments.
- While using Redis’s pub or sub mechanism, it does not guarantee message delivery. It means that if you are not active, you will not receive the message you are subscribed to. On the other hand, RabbitMQ supports persistent messages and is meant for providing reasonable high throughput in most situations without configurations. Moreover, since Redis is an in memory data store, it does not support persistent messages.
- RabbitMQ allows you to have an extra layer of security by using SSL certificates to encrypt your data. However, Redis does not support SSL natively. You need to opt for a paid service if you want to enable SSL.
- In RabbitMQ, producers should specify the type while publishing the message to an exchange. On the contrary, producers can either choose Literal Channel or Pattern Match Channel while publishing the message.
- You can send up to 50K messages per second in RabbitMQ, while in Redis you can scale up to million messages per second.
- It outperforms clustering by supporting clustering.
- Both point to point and pub sub messaging are supported by RabbitMQ. However, it is not supported by Redis.
RabbitMQ vs Redis Conclusion
So, based on the above mentioned pros and cons and their differences, it is highly recommended to select the one that fits well according to the current scenario. Redis provides fast and in memory capabilities. So, it is best for short retention of messages where persistence is not important. On the other hand, if there is a requirement for complex routing, you should directly opt for RabbitMQ.
