Load Balancing ActimeMQ Artemis in JBoss EAP 7.2.0

Question

We are developing an application using Spring Boot and Apache Camel that is reading a message from ActiveMQ Artemis, doing some transformation, and sending it to ActiveMQ Artemis. Our application is deployed as war file in on-premise JBoss EAP 7.2.0. Both the source and target applications are remote to our application and they are also deployed on JBoss EAP 7.2.0. The remote queues to which Camel is connecting are ActiveMQ Artemis which were created in JBoss and connecting using http-remoting protocol. These setup was working when there were only one node of each of the applications.

Now we are making the source and target applications 3 nodes each (ie they will be deployed in multiple JBoss servers). For accessing the front-end of the source and target applications we are configuring and accessing them through a load balancer.

Can we configure the load balancer to access the source and target brokers from the Camel layer? There will be 3 source and 3 target brokers. Or is clustering the brokers the only option in this case?

We are thinking of load balancing between the queues and not clustering. Suppose we have three queues q1 , q2 , and q3 with corresponding brokers b1 , b2 , and b3 . I will configure the load balancer url in the Camel layer like http-remoting://<load-balancer-url>:<port> (much like we do while load balancing HTTP API requests). Any message coming in will hit the load balancer, and the load balancer will decide which queue to route the message to.

Answer 1

JMS connections are stateful . When a client creates a connection there is no indication of the queues to which it will send messages. The load-balancer will have to direct that client's connection to either b1 , b2 , or b3 and it will have no way to determine where it should go. A load-balancer working with messaging will almost certainly only be able to balance connections , not messages. It sounds like you want load-balancing at the message level instead. Perhaps you should look into something like Qpid Dispatch Router .

Messaging doesn't use HTTP so using an HTTP load balancer like you do with your HTTP API(s) won't work. It's easy for a load-balancer to inspect HTTP headers and route requests, especially since HTTP is stateless. However, messaging connections are stateful and the protocols are typically quite a bit more complex than HTTP. I don't know of any load-balancers that will work the way you are wanting for messaging.

Answer 2

You need your client not to use the topology, you can do this by using "setUseTopologyForLoadBalancing" on your AMQConnectionFactory. If you get the connection factory from EAP I think this is configurable on the connection factory since EAP 7.3.