March 08, 2018 / by Zibby Keaton / In design

Helping Enterprises Evaluate Performance of Messaging Solutions

The acceleration of microservice-based and cloud-based applications has put a growing focus on how data is connected to services, applications and users. This focus has led to a number of new innovations and new products that support messaging and queueing needs. It has also contributed to increased demands on messaging and queuing solutions, making performance and scalability critical to success.

OpenMessaging was created to ensure that users could confidently choose and deploy the distributed messaging technology that best meets their specific requirements. Since its launch last fall, OpenMessaging has enabled steady progress on the implementation and adoption of open protocols and connectivity for messaging solutions allowing users to adopt messaging solutions without the burden and complexity of incompatibility and proprietary interfaces.

Earlier this week, we announced the addition of a multi-platform benchmark to OpenMessaging, which adds a valuable new dimension to OpenMessaging. The growing demands on messaging solutions make performance and scalability critically important criteria for choosing messaging technology. However, there are no multi-platform tools based on open standards to aid organizations in assessing performance of messaging and queuing solutions. This benchmark fills the need for a toolkit that makes it easy to measure and compare performance of these solutions.

The OpenMessaging benchmark is designed to assess performance characteristics that apply to real-world scenarios including end-to-end latency, throughput, and scalability of topics and partitions. It is provided as an open, customizable, and extensible kit giving users the ability to tailor it to help assess performance based on their specific requirements.

Members and Community Weigh In

“With the variety of messaging solutions available, including open source solutions such as Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, and Apache RocketMQ, the lack of an industry-wide standard for messaging makes evaluating solutions difficult,” said Von Gosling, Alibaba Senior Architect, Apache RocketMQ Co-Creator and PMC member. “To address this, Alibaba and other leading organizations have launched the OpenMessaging project within the Linux Foundation and have designed an OpenMessaging benchmark to compare different messaging systems in many dimensions, including common messaging use cases and transactional scenarios. We hope to see more and more messaging vendors join this open effort to make it the standard for how messaging performance is measured and compared.”

“Performance and scalability are crucial criteria when choosing a messaging solution, but to date customers have been poorly served when it comes to tools for evaluating their options,” said Matteo Merli, co-founder of Streamlio, a founding member of OpenMessaging. “The new OpenMessaging benchmark provides customers with the tools they need to evaluate and choose the right solution to meet their performance and scalability demands, both now and in the future.”

This benchmark is another great example of how OpenMessaging is providing users the standard-based tools and solutions they need to confidently select and deploy messaging solutions. As part of the OpenMessaging project, the OpenMessaging community will continue to enhance and extend this benchmark to meet industry needs. For more information and to access the benchmark kit as well as contribute to its future development, you can visit https://github.com/openmessaging/openmessaging-benchmark.

To learn more about OpenMessaging and to join the OpenMessaging community, visit https://openmessaging.cloud.