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RabbitMQ Cluster Operator for Kubernetes

The RabbitMQ team develop and maintain two kubernetes operators:

  • RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator automates provisioning, management, and operations of RabbitMQ clusters running on Kubernetes.
  • RabbitMQ Messaging Topology Operator manages RabbitMQ messaging topologies within a RabbitMQ cluster deployed via the RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator.

Kubernetes Operators are software extensions to Kubernetes that provide custom resources for management of applications, services and their components.

In this and other Operator related guides, we use "Operator" (with a capital O) to refer to a Kubernetes Operator pattern implementation and "operator" (with a lowercase o) to refer to a technical operations engineer (administrator).

RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator

RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator provides a consistent and easy way to deploy RabbitMQ clusters to Kubernetes and run them, including "day two" (continuous) operations. RabbitMQ clusters deployed using the operator can be used by applications running on Kubernetes or outside of Kubernetes.

Documentation of Cluster Operator spans several guides:

In addition, a separate Operator for managing cluster objects collectively known as the messaging topology: virtual hosts, user, queues, etc. It is covered in the following guides:

  • Installing RabbitMQ Messaging Topology Operator
  • Using RabbitMQ Messaging Topology Operator
  • Using TLS with Messaging Topology Kubernetes Operator
  • Troubleshooting Messaging Topology Kubernetes Operator

The operator provides the following key features:

  • Provisioning of single-node and multi-node RabbitMQ clusters
  • Automatic reconciliation of deployed clusters whenever their actual state does not match the expected state
  • Monitoring of RabbitMQ clusters using Prometheus and Grafana
  • Scaling up and automated rolling upgrades of RabbitMQ clusters

Design principles

RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator was designed with the following ideas and concepts in mind:

  • It should provide RabbitMQ node configuration flexibility
  • It should provide reasonably safe defaults where possible
  • It should simplify RabbitMQ operations

Following these ideas, the Operator will not modify an existing RabbitmqCluster spec. This implies that, when the Operator is upgraded, it will not automatically update existing instances of RabbitmqCluster with new defaults, if any, or to the latest version of RabbitMQ.

The only exception to this, is when a field is removed from the spec, by user action, the Operator will set the default value.

Limitations

RabbitMQ Cluster Reconciliation

Deleted Secret objects will be recreated by the Kubernetes Operator but the newly generated secret value will not be deployed to the RabbitMQ cluster. For example, if the Secret with administrator credentials is deleted, a new Secret will be created with new username and password, but those will not be reflected in the RabbitMQ cluster. It works the same way for any Secret value, e.g. the value of the shared inter-node authentication secret known as the Erlang cookie.

RabbitMQ Cluster Feature Flags

Cluster Operator does not support disabling any RabbitMQ feature flags. The Operator lists all available feature flags and enables all of them at cluster start.

RabbitMQ Messaging Topology Operator

RabbitMQ Messaging Topology Operator supports managing RabbitMQ messaging topologies objects through kubernetes declarative API.

Documentation of Messaging Topology Operator structured as following:

Source Code

Both Operators are open source. You can contribute to its development on GitHub:

License

Both Operators are released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

Supported Kubernetes Versions

RabbitMQ Operators are intended to be used with any Kubernetes-compliant platform. If you encounter an issue with a particular distribution of Kubernetes, please check for known issues in the GitHub repo.

For more information on which Kubernetes & RabbitMQ server versions are supported by the operator, please consult the README.

Getting Help and Providing Feedback

If you have questions about the contents of this guide or any other topic related to RabbitMQ, don't hesitate to ask them on the RabbitMQ mailing list.

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