Differences between AMQP and ZeroMQ

distributed-computing actor amqp zeromq
adelbertc picture adelbertc · Sep 28, 2012 · Viewed 14.6k times · Source

Recently started looking into these AMQP (RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ) and ZeroMQ technologies, being interested in distributed systems/computation. Been Googling and StackOverflow'ing around, couldn't find a definite comparison between the two.

The farthest I got is that the two aren't really comparable, but I want to know the differences. It seems to me ZeroMQ is more decentralized (no message broker playing middle-man handling messages/guarenteering delivery) and as such is faster, but is not meant to be a fully fledged system but something to be handled more programmatically, something like Actors.

AMQP on the other hand seems to be a more fully fledged system, with a central message broker ensuring reliable delivery, but slower than ZeroMQ because of this. However, the central broker creates a single point of failure.

Perhaps a metaphor would be client/server vs. P2P?

Are my findings true? Also, what would be the advantages, disadvantages, or use cases of using one over the other? A comparison of the uses of *MQ vs. something like Akka Actors would be nice as well.

EDIT Did a bit more looking around.. ZeroMQ seems to be the new contender to AMQP, seems to be much faster, only issue would be adoption/implementations?

Answer

Pieter Hintjens picture Pieter Hintjens · Oct 18, 2012

Here's a fairly detailed comparison of AMQP and 0MQ: http://www.zeromq.org/docs:welcome-from-amqp

Note that 0MQ is also a protocol (ZMTP) with several implementations, and a community.

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