ServiceStack Redis Mq: is eventual consistency an issue?

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I'm looking at turning a monolith application into a microservice-oriented application and in doing so will need a robust messaging system for interprocesses-communication. The idea is for the microserviceprocesses to be run on a cluster of servers for HA, with requests to be processed to be added on a message queue that all the applications can access. I'm looking at using Redis as both a KV-store for transient data and also as a message broker using the ServiceStack framework for .Net but I worry that the concept of eventual consistency applied by Redis will make processing of the requests unreliable. This is how I understand Redis to function in regards to Mq:

  1. Client 1 posts a request to a queue on node 1
  2. Node 1 will inform all listeners on that queue using pub/sub of the existence of the request and will also push the requests to node 2 asynchronously.
  3. The listeners on node 1 will pull the request from the node, only 1 of them will obtain it as should be. An update of the removal of the request is sent to node 2 asynchronously but will take some time to arrive.
  4. The initial request is received by node 2 (assuming a bit of a delay in RTT) which will go ahead and inform listeners connected to it using pub/sub. Before the update from node 1 is received regarding the removal of the request from the queue a listener on node 2 may also pull the request. The result being that two listeners ended up processing the same request, which would cause havoc in our system.

Is there anything in Redis or the implementation of ServiceStack Redis Mq that would prevent the scenario described to occur? Or is there something else regarding replication in Redis that I have misunderstood? Or should I abandon the Redis/SS approach for Mq and use something like RabbitMQ instead that I have understood to be ACID-compliant?

servicestack.redis redis
1 Answers

It's not possible for the same message to be processed twice in Redis MQ as the message worker pops the message off the Redis List backed MQ and all Redis operations are atomic so no other message worker will have access to the messages that have been removed from the List.

ServiceStack.Redis (which Redis MQ uses) only supports Redis Sentinel for HA which despite Redis supporting multiple replicas they only contain a read only view of the master dataset, so all write operations like List add/remove operations can only happen on the single master instance.

One notable difference from using Redis MQ instead of specific purpose MQ like Rabbit MQ is that Redis doesn't support ACK's, so if the message worker process that pops the message off the MQ crashes then it's message is lost, as opposed to Rabbit MQ where if the stateful connection of an un Ack'd message dies the message is restored by the RabbitMQ server back to the MQ.

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