CloudMQ Takes Message Queuing to the Cloud

With cloud computing driving the need for queuing and Enterprise Service Bus style services in the cloud, Freedom OSS has introduced cloudMQ, which the company refers to as a Message Queuing as a Service solution.

According to Joel Davne, CEO of Freedom OSS, cloudMQ is a simple way to start exploring integration of messaging into applications because no installation or configuration is necessary. Indeed, cloudMQ provides cross-platform integration for the enterprise, on-demand, real-time business-to-business information exchange, real-time business intelligence, and complex event processing, the company said.

Moreover, cloudMQ has the capacity to hold a virtually unlimited number of messages and support thousands of clients, Freedom OSS officials said. And unlike Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS), cloudMQ provides all of the enterprise messaging features such as message order preservation, single-phase and two-phase transactions and unlimited message sizes, the company said.

However, cloudMQ uses Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) storage to create an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) messaging backbone that spans into thousands of messaging instances, Freedom OSS said.

"Our goal is to provide an 'Internet Scale' Message Queuing as a Service infrastructure and make it easier for enterprises to enter the cloud space," said Max Yankelevich, chief architect, Freedom OSS.

“We have been implementing Event Driven and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) for various customers. Message oriented middleware solutions, such as IBM MQ, ActiveMQ and SonicMQ, are key to materializing these architectures, but present a substantial hurdle in terms of up-front licensing costs, hardware procurement, proper configuration and available skill-sets for 'feeding and nurturing' this infrastructure," Yankelevich said.

So, cloudMQ leverages the Amazon Cloud to provide enterprise-grade message queuing capabilities, Davne said. By combining on-demand computing capacity from Amazon and open-source innovation from Freedom OSS, cloudMQ delivers scalable, enterprise-class connectivity that grows with business demands to exchange event data and enables organizations to deploy applications to virtualized environments seamlessly, the company said. CloudMQ enables deployment of SOA and ESB components directly to remote virtualized environments.

"Our target customers are enterprises and B2B data exchanges," Yankelevich said. "We made it extremely easy to access and manage cloudMQ by not disrupting ways how application developers are currently accessing messaging infrastructure. We support Java Messaging Service (JMS), AMQP and REST [Representational State Transfer] or XML/HTTP interfaces. We also provide a comprehensive console for provisioning and monitoring cloudMQ. And we provide extensive security features.

For security, cloudMQ relies on existing open and accepted standards, and supports: Multiple security token formats, multiple trust domains, multiple signature formats, multiple encryption technologies, and end-to-end message content security and not just transport-level security Web services.

"We also have been involved in a few business-to-business exchange implementations that should have been leveraging event-driven architecture across enterprise boundaries, but ended up doing a kludge Web Services polling implementation," Yankelevich said. "Capturing a stream of real-time events on the cloudMQ presents an enormous opportunity to create various value-add business applications that will analyze, aggregate and utilize these constantly flowing data streams. Some of the products on our road map are cloudCEP - Complex Event Processing, real-time business Intelligence, dashboards and reporting and a few others."

In addition, "We are also opening cloudMQ to ISVs [independent software vendors] and independent developers to enable them to create business solutions on top of this infrastructure," he said.