Envoy proxy with rabbitmq

Question

We have been migrating to .net core console app microservices. currently, each microservice works in a chain and puts messages in rabbitmq, then the next service picks a message from rabbitmq, processes it, then puts in another rabbitmq....we have around 9 services.

We are seeing issues where services fail and have no idea why, but often see problems with rabbitmq connections or network issues hitting the next server (some vm's have all services hosted on the same box, others are distributed between boxes) I've been looking at envoy proxy as it deals with the circuit breaker etc stuff and claims to have observability

However, I cannot find anywhere online that has anyone using envoy proxy with rabbitmq

Can envoy proxy be used with rabbitmq in this manner? Or does envoy proxy act as the queue?

We deal with about 4,000 messages a sec currently, and we need to process in near as real-time as possible.

Answer 1

Envoy does not act as the queue, so it can't replace your message-based communication system. It can, however, proxy traffic to/from the RabbitMQ servers to give you some bits of what you're looking for.

What you'd do is use the TCP Proxy capability to setup TCP reverse proxies to RabbitMQ. Then your servers should all connect to the Envoy proxy rather than directly to the message queue. Envoy's built in stats will then output metrics on the TCP connections (all the RabbitMQ protocols seem to be TCP) that it handles. It also does intrinsically support circuit breakers, timeouts, retries, etc, so you'll get all those. But you'll definitely have to tweak those to your particular deployment.

We've done this pattern multiple times at my company, just with Kafka rather than RabbitMQ. However, since they're both TCP based it should work similarly.