Watch: Elia group presents how KubeMQ with Dapr integration enables Kubernetes implementation

We are excited to share with you an inspiring webinar presented by Elia Group, one of our valued customers, on their journey of migrating to microservices and Kubernetes using KubeMQ.

In the webinar hosted by Dapr, Gilles Flisch from Elia Group shares the success story and explains how KubeMQ and Dapr have helped them to set the infrastructure for seamless integration to Kubernetes. During the webinar, Gilles describes Elia’s challenges in moving to Kubernetesm, highlights the reasons for selecting KubeMQ (minute 16) to power Elia’s microservices architecture, and demonstrates how easy it is to implement KubeMQ (minute 24).

Contact us for a demo or try KubeMQ Pro for 30 days

Join our CTO Lior Nabat on Thursday, June 3, 2021, at 12:00 AM (PDT)
for the webinar hosted by the CNCF.  

This webinar will show how to build powerful connectivity between edge sources and the Kubernetes backend, including:

– How to deploy KubeMQ’s lightweight server on the edge

– How to communicate between edge and the Kubernetes backend

– How to protect from edge degraded network stability

– How to achieve high availability on the edge

Register for the webinar

Deploy KubeMQ (free) in less than 1 minute!

This article published on Red Hat marketplace explains how KubeMQ customers build scalable messaging platforms with Kubernetes Operators.

Higlights from the article:

“What exactly are Operators, and how do they help manage these stateful applications? Let’s take a look at Operators in detail, how they work within Kubernetes, and how the KubeMQ messaging platform uses Operators to help you build complex and scalable messaging services with minimal coding and overhead.”

“This allows for better performance, scalability, and resilience. One key to success with this approach is utilizing Operators as the deployment and management tool for KubeMQ. The Operator deploys the clusters and ensures that the various KubeMQ bridges, sources, and targets are configured correctly for each cluster. This extends to how KubeMQ was written utilizing Go. This makes KubeMQ fast and helps hook KubeMQ into native Kubernetes data models, events, and APIs, making it less complicated to manage the state of the clusters. It also allows for easier configuration validation.”

“Deploying as an operator also helps KubeMQ keep overhead to a minimum. For example, a large financial company with high volumes of real-time messages for price quotes, transactions, and client funding leverages KubeMQ to decrease the number of servers previously required to fulfill their needs.”

“The KubeMQ Operator also helps track state—a key reason for leveraging KubeMQ for reliable cross/hybrid cloud deployments. First, this state can validate that the desired capacity and configuration are in place for each cluster. Comparing the desired state in the CR against the existing state in Kubernetes allows the Operator to ensure that failures are caught and addressed, capacity is added as required, and the various bridges, sources, and targets are configured”

Read the full article on Red Hat marketplace blog

This tutorial shows how to connect microservices to each other automatically in minutes. We will demonstrate how KubeMQ Cluster can connect three essential services – Redis Cache, PostgreSQL Database, and Elastic Database with two other microservices applications – in just a few configuration settings and without spending time to write code.

To achieve this, KubeMQ Connectors are used to enable access for these two types of applications:

1. An application that sends and receives requests to the three services and gets back responses using the KubeMQ query pattern.

2. An application that uses KubeMQ as an API gateway to communicate via a REST call to the three services.

First thing’s first; using Kubernetes command-line tool (kubectl) CLI you need to check that all services are deployed and are working. Here’s how you do it.

–> On your main page, type “kubectl get pods –A”. You should see that PostgreSQL and Redis are running.

–> For Elastic, type “kubectl get sts – A.” You should see that Elastic Search is indicated as “logging.”

The fastest way to deploy KubeMQ is by downloading it from KubeMQ quick start page. After deploying KubeMQ, use kubemqctl CLI tool to verify the following:

–> To check the readiness of your cluster, type “kubemqctl g c.”

–> To check whether the connectors are running, type “kubemqctl g con”

After deploying KubeMQ components, the next step is to add the integrations to the services. This will be done by using kubemqctl CLI automated building and management tools.

1. Type “kubemqctl m” execute and select your manager option as “Manage KubeMQ Integrations”

2. For the next steps, type or select the following options:

i. Manage Integrations Option: Add Integration
ii. Cluster Destination: kubemq/kubemq-cluster
iii. Add Integration Type: Target Integration for kubemq/kubemq-cluster
iv. Unique Integration Name: redis
v. Select Target Kind: cache.redis
vi. Redis url: redis://redis-svc.redis:6379
vii. KubeMQ Source Kind: kubemq.query (It means you will be able to send and receive data for redis)
viii. KubeMQ grpc endpoint address: kubemq-cluster-grpc.kubemq:50000
ix. Query Channel: redis

3. Proceed to set values to defaults but do not add middlewares to the binding when prompted. Save your Integration progress.

A notification acknowledging Redis Integration has been successfully added will appear.

Repeat the same procedure for both PostgreSQL and Elastic databases.

Once all the 3 integrations are using KubeMQ query for sending and receiving, next thing is to test the integrations with an application connected to KubeMQ. The application is designed to send and receive requests for the 3 integrations (Redis, PostgreSQL, and Elastic).

For Redis, the application performs the following requests:

1. Set – Sending Redis data with a random key
2. Get – Getting back the data
3. Delete – Deleting the key from Redis

For PostgreSQLs, the requests to be run are as follows:

1. Transaction – Several queries are running one after another, entering the data in rows into the table. If the table doesn’t exist, a new table will be created for the data to be added.
2. Query – Retrieve data from the table

For Elastic, the 6 requests to be run are as follows:

The first 3 requests are managing indexes:

1. Check Index existence – checking if the log index exists in the elastic database
2. Delete Index – if exist it will be deleted
3. Create Index – recreate the same log index

The next 3 requests are managing document for the elastic search

1. Set – Set and save the document to elastic
2. Get – Retrieve the document
3. Delete – Delete the document

To summarize our progress thus far, this application is simulating the request and response we can perform with the Redis Cache, PostgreSQL Database, and Elastic Database integrations. 
The next step is to add an HTTP source to allow other services to communicate with Redis, PostgreSQLs, and Elastic.

Use kubemqctl CLI:

1. Type “kubemqctl m” execute and select your manager option as “Manage KubeMQ Integrations”

2. Under “Integration Type”, select “Source Integration for kubemq/kubemq-cluster”.

3. Both unique integration name and source kind are “http”.

4. When prompted for supported methods, use the post method.

5. Use dynamic mapping for HTTP requests. This means that every request will forward to a specific channel in KubeMQ.

6. For the next steps, type or select the following options:
a. KubeMQ Target Kind: kubemq.querry
b. KubeMQ grpc endpoint address: kubemq-cluster-grpc.kubemq:50000
c. Channel Mapping Mode: Dynamic

7. Proceed to set values to defaults but do not add middlewares to the binding when prompted. Save your Integration progress.

The new integration is can now receive requests in port 8080 and send data to KubeMQ query Target.

To test the integration, a similar procedure to the application testing will be performed. The HTTP service communication with KubeMQ cluster will be established through the “Source” integration we have setup (that is listening to port 8080). From KubeMQ cluster the messages will be processed to the 3 integrations (Redis, PostgreSQL, and Elastic) the same as in the previous testing.
After running the HTTP API service, you can immediately tell that the requests were processed successfully; the same as described in the application testing section.

This tutorial shows how KubeMQ CLI tool is used to easily create and manage communication between microservices, with automatic network creation functionalities. Using the CLI tool, a basic microservices connected backend was setup in a few configurations commands saving major code work and time. A smooth integration is a click away for a long list of over 100 external services such as AWS, GCP, and Azure popular services; as well as independent DB, cache, messaging, and storage services supported by KubeMQ Sources and Targets connectors.

This article describes how to migrate an existing service using RabbitMQ external server to Kubernetes using KubeMQ while preserving the ability to communicate with other legacy services connected to the RabbitMQ server. For this purpose, we will use the KubeMQ Targets and Sources connectors to convert messages between RabbitMQ and KubeMQ as follows:

KubeMQ Sources connector will consume messages from RabbitMQ topic named “Ping”, then convert the messages to a KubeMQ events format and send the messages to events.rabbit.ping channel on the KubeMQ cluster.

KubeMQ targets connector subscribes to KubeMQ “Pong” channel events.rabbit.pong. It then converts the message to RabbitMQ format and publishes the messages to the Pong topic.

We will use 2 applications here. The first one is the ping application, which is the Legacy Service. The ping application sends ping messages to the RabbitMQ ping topic and consumes messages from the pong topic. The second application, which is the migrated to Kubernetes one, subscribes to the events.rabbit.ping channel and sends back pong responses to events.rabbit.pong channel.

Before building the integrations, you must deploy a KubeMQ cluster. This can be done by typing, “kubemqctl g c” from KubeMQ CTL console, we can see that we have already deployed the KubeMQ cluster on the KubeMQ namespace with 3 pods.

We will start by managing and adding the integration needed for the migration. After typing “kubemqctl m” command we will select “Manage KubeMQ Integrations”

Next, we will add 2 integrations. The first one is a source integration for connecting to a RabbitMQ server and forwarding all the messages to KubeMQ. The second one will be a target integration that will listen to messages that are coming from KubeMQ and send it to the RabbitMQ server.

To add the KubeMQ Source integration, follow this is the procedure:

1. Select “Source Integration”
2. Setting a unique name such as “rabbit.ping”.
3. Under “Source Kind,” select “messaging.rabbitmq”.
4. Enter the connection string of the external RabbitMQ.
5. When prompted to set dynamic channel mapping, decline.
6. Set queue name as “ping”.
7. For Target Kind, select “kubemq.events”.
8. Set your channel mapping mode to “implicit,” and when prompted to use 'events.rabbit.ping’ as the events channel, accept it.
9. When prompted to add middlewares, decline, and then save your settings.

To add the KubeMQ Target integration, follow this procedure:

1. Set your integration as “rabbit.pong”
2. Select your target kind as “messaging.rabbitmq”.
3. Your connection string is the same as the one you used previously.
4. For KubeMQ Source Kind, select “kubem.events”. This will allow you to receive replies coming from the pong application.
5. Set events channel as “evenrts.rabbit.pong”. When prompted to add middlewares, decline just like you did earlier.
6. Save all your settings.

Now you have two integrations: Source and Target. KubeMQ Source integration receives ping message from RabbitMQ, connects to RabbitMQ server, and converts them to events messages in KubeMQ. The KubeMQ Target integration listens to the events channel (events.rabbit.pong) and sends it to the RabbitMQ server.

After we have configured the Sources and Targets connectors we can now test the applications. The first one is the Legacy Service Ping, which is connected only to RabbitMQ, sending and receiving messages from topics in RabbitMQ.
The second one is the Migrated to Kubernetes application Pong, which is directly linked to the KubeMQ cluster. Run RabbitMQ Ping Sender App. It should immediately start connecting to RabbitMQ. However, no response should be received because the pong app is not yet live. Therefore, go ahead and run Pong Service App. You should now see that the pong is connecting directly to the KubeMQ cluster, and there is back and forth communication between the Ping and the Pong applications.

We have demonstrated how to Migrate RabbitMQ connected service from a legacy environment to Kubernetes by using KubeMQ platform components. This type of migrations can be easily configured by using KubeMQ CTL automatic connectors creation functionalities, saving developers, and DevOps team precious time and costs in their migration to Kubernetes journey.

KubeMQ Control Center is Upgraded with Automatic Network Creation Functionalities

We are proud to announce the upgrade of the control center, used to easily create and manage message-based connectivity of multiple Kubernetes deployments, with automatic network creation functionalities. The automatic network creation functionalities are being launched during KubeCon NA 2020 where visitors are invited to get a firsthand impression of the automatic functionality efficiency and ease of use in live demonstrations at the KubeMQ booth.

The automatic network creation is a CLI that easily and transparently creates and connects, KubeMQ connectors and bridges while eliminating the hurdle of setting parameters and editing configuration files. Using the control center automatic functionalities, the network architecture is managed, elements are being added or modified, all from a single easy to use interface. Smooth integration is a click away for a long list of external services such as DB, cache, messaging, and storage. KubeMQ cluster creation and management are available, including KubeMQ cluster quick duplication and editing.

KubeMQ platform is a Kubernetes native, enterprise-grade message broker and message queue with ready-to-use connectors, bridges, and control center. KubeMQ simplifies dramatically the deployment and management of the messaging system. With support of all messaging patterns KubeMQ is a one-stop shop for building fast and efficient microservices architecture.

KubeMQ platform enables microservices from multiple environments to communicate with each other and build one hybrid infrastructure solution across multi-cloud, on-premises, and at the edge. KubeMQ platform enables enterprises to gradually migrate their monolithic or microservices infrastructure to a hybrid cloud solution safely, seamlessly and without service disruption.

KubeMQ components are:

KubeMQ server supports all messaging patterns such as Queue, Stream, Pub/Sub, and RPC.

KubeMQ bridges, provide a perfect way to bridge, replicate, or aggregate messaging between Kubernetes clusters across cloud environments.

KubeMQ targets enable instant connection between microservices and a rich set of cloud and external services.

KubeMQ sources support gradual migration from a monolithic environment with legacy messaging systems to an advanced Kubernetes hybrid solution.

And KubeMQ control center, which enables developers to easily create and manage multiple infrastructure Kubernetes deployments.

To try the new control center just sign up free for KubeMQ!