Message brokers in a microservice architecture

Abstract: The microservice architectural pattern refers to a system consisting of independently deployable services that communicate across networks. RabbitMQ is a popular message broker that can be used to make this communication possible. An alternative to this is Amazon Simple Queuing Service (SQS), which is a fully managed queuing service. By performing a literature- and case study, two systems with a microservice architecture are developed. One using RabbitMQ to communicate between the services, and the other using Amazon SQS. The systems are compared, with regards to message latency, ease of use and maintainability. The results show that RabbitMQ provides much lower message latency than Amazon SQS. Amazon SQS is however both easier to maintain and to use than RabbitMQ.