RabbitMQ really is not "Cloud Messaging Technology" at its core. It's an erlang based message broker that implements the AMQP standard. I'm not sure why Spring is marketing it as a cloud technology other than for marketing purposes.
RabbitMQ Cloud Messaging is all over the industry media, but in fact, it is not a cloud messaging platform/solution at all. It is an open source version of a traditional message-oriented middleware solution based on the controversial AMQP standard that RedHat has patents pending on. SpringSource/VMWare would have to rearchitect the product to make it into an actual cloud messaging platform. As of now, it is a traditional system that you have to install, configure, and maintain yourself. You can run it on a hosted virtual server (sorry, a cloud server) at someone else's datacenter (Amazon, Rackspace, Terremark, ...) or run it in your office.
There are a few (I can count them on one hand) true cloud messaging platforms out there. Two of the big players support messages up to 8KBs in size, and two up and coming players support 1MG or more. All are pretty cool and have their pros and cons. A big differentiator is if they are REST services only or also provide local transactional queueing (a software + services approach).
Anyway, thanks for providing me an outlet for a quiet rant.
As you note, it's fit for the purpose, that's good enough for me. The cloud is where this sort of action is today.
Much better than Intel's experimental "cloud" processor chip, the one with 48 non-cache coherent IA32 cores. Not quite a marketecture like Netburst (P4), but quite bogus.
I think the next step will be "We sell solutions to run your own cloud". This just warms you up to the idea. RabbitMQ will become the "vmware private cloud" equivalent to SQS.
This is interesting news from a strategy perspective. I think this is VMWare trying to become relevant in a market where they currently don't have much impact on. A few weeks ago they hired Salvatore because of Redis, and now they're acquiring RabbitMQ.
Sounds like they're looking for ways to become a bigger player - and I'll admit I think they're pulling it off with these two moves.
