What Is RabbitMQ And How Do You Manage It With Kubernetes?

The world of Kubernetes and RabbitMQ evolves rapidly. Our popular 2022 post laid the groundwork for HA deployments; now, join us for the crucial 2025 update to ensure your architecture remains cutting-edge.

As organizations continue their powerful shift from monolithic architecture (where all the code building the application exists as a single, monolithic entity) to microservices architecture. This transition simplifies application management, making it easier to build, deploy, update, test, and scale each service independently without affecting other parts of the architecture.

When an application is built following a microservice architecture pattern, the core idea is to develop a single application consisting of two or more small, independent services. The application’s overall functionality is the sum of these collaborating microservices.

There are different ways for microservices to communicate, including:

• Message Brokers (e.g., RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar)
• Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)
• REST APIs / GraphQL

How Microservices Communicate?

We fundamentally have two modes of communication between microservices:

• Synchronous: Each service calls another microservice directly. While simple for tightly coupled interactions, this introduces direct dependencies and can lead to cascading failures if a downstream service is unavailable.
• Asynchronous: This is where message brokers shine. For example, Service A publishes a message to a central hub or message broker (like RabbitMQ), and Service B later receives it from the queue. If Service B is temporarily unavailable or down, messages are safely stored in the queue. Once Service B is operational, it will resume processing messages. Crucially, the rest of the application can continue operating, decoupling producer and consumer. This is a cornerstone of resilient Event-Driven Architectures (EDA).

Several powerful message brokers are prevalent in modern microservice architectures, including RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, and Apache Pulsar. In this blog post, we will be discussing RabbitMQ – a highly versatile and robust choice.

What is RabbitMQ?

RabbitMQ is a widely adopted open-source message broker. A message broker acts as an intermediary, enabling communication and information exchange between disparate systems, applications, and services. They allow senders to issue messages without needing to know the receivers’ specific location, active status, or number. RabbitMQ provides a common, reliable platform for applications to send and receive messages, ensuring messages have a safe place to reside until they are processed.

Key Features of RabbitMQ (Updated for 2025 Context)

• Clustering: A RabbitMQ cluster is a logical grouping of one or several nodes, sharing users, virtual hosts, queues, exchanges, bindings, runtime parameters, and other distributed state. This is fundamental for scaling and availability.
• High Availability & Data Safety: Achieved primarily through Quorum Queues (now the default and recommended choice for HA).
• Multi-Protocol Support: Supports numerous official client libraries and multiple messaging protocols, including AMQP 0-9-1, AMQP 1.0, STOMP, MQTT, and more via plugins, enabling a wide array of use cases.
• Management & Monitoring: Provides a comprehensive Web UI for management, HTTP API for programmatic control and monitoring, and robust command-line tools.
• Extensibility: A rich plugin ecosystem extends RabbitMQ’s capabilities for federation, Shovel, delayed messages, and more.

Queues in RabbitMQ – Classic (Mirrored) vs. Quorum (2025 Recommendations)

The distinction between queue types for HA is critical, and RabbitMQ’s recommendations have significantly evolved since 2022.

• Classic Queues (Previously Mirrored Queues):
• Historically used mirroring for HA, involving a single leader and one or more mirror queues. All operations went through the leader, which replicated commands to mirrors.
• 2025 Update: While still functional, Classic Mirrored Queues are considered a legacy feature. They are actively discouraged for new deployments requiring HA due to known performance limitations, complexity in failure scenarios, and eventual consistency challenges compared to Quorum Queues. They are officially deprecated as of RabbitMQ 3.12 (released in late 2023) and are planned for removal in future major versions. Avoid using these for HA in new projects.
• Quorum Queues (Recommended for HA & Data Safety):
• Introduced to provide superior high availability and strong data safety. They leverage the Raft consensus algorithm (a leader-based protocol) to ensure data consistency and durability across replicas.
• Each Quorum Queue acts as a replicated queue, with a leader and multiple followers. Clients (publishers and consumers) always interact with the leader, which then replicates commands (write, read, ack, etc.) to the followers.
• 2025 Update: Quorum Queues are now the default queue type for new RabbitMQ installations since version 3.9. They are the strongly recommended solution for achieving high availability and data durability. They offer better performance characteristics, simpler operational semantics, and stronger consistency guarantees compared to Classic Mirrored Queues. If you need HA and data safety, always choose Quorum Queues.

Managing RabbitMQ using Kubernetes Operators (Current Best Practices)

Kubernetes Operators have become the standard and most robust way to deploy and manage stateful applications like RabbitMQ on Kubernetes. RabbitMQ provides two powerful Kubernetes Operators:

1. RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator (Now the primary):
2. Automates the provisioning, management, and operations of RabbitMQ clusters running on Kubernetes. This provides a consistent and declarative method of deployment, scaling, and lifecycle management.
3. 2025 Update: The operator has matured significantly, offering advanced features for backups, upgrades, monitoring integration, and self-healing capabilities. It’s the cornerstone for running production-grade RabbitMQ on Kubernetes. Clusters deployed via the operator can be used by applications both inside and outside the Kubernetes cluster.
4. RabbitMQ Messaging Topology Kubernetes Operator:
5. Used in conjunction with RabbitMQ clusters deployed via the RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator.
6. A Messaging Topology is the declarative definition of RabbitMQ objects (such as exchanges, queues, bindings, and policies) that define specific messaging or streaming scenarios. This operator allows you to manage these logical RabbitMQ components directly from Kubernetes manifests, enabling GitOps workflows for your messaging infrastructure.

Why HA Mode? 

High Availability (HA) refers to an architecture’s ability to minimize downtime and provide automated failover in case of component failure (e.g., node crash, network outage). For mission-critical messaging, HA ensures that message processing continues with minimal or no impact on availability or data loss.

2025 Update: When discussing HA for RabbitMQ, the focus is almost exclusively on Quorum Queues.

• Simplified HA: If you are creating Quorum Queues, you inherently get HA and data safety. You don’t need to configure extra policies for mirroring, as you would have with Classic Queues.
• Data Safety: Quorum Queues guarantee that messages are safely replicated across a configurable number of nodes, preventing data loss even if a leader node fails.
• Automated Failover: The Raft protocol within Quorum Queues automatically elects a new leader if the current one becomes unavailable, ensuring continuous service.

Conclusion

Implementing RabbitMQ in HA mode is no longer an “extra step” if you choose Quorum Queues; it’s a built-in advantage. For any new deployment requiring resilient message handling, Quorum Queues managed by the RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator are the undisputed best practice.

At meshIQ, we understand the complexities of managing dynamic messaging environments like RabbitMQ on Kubernetes. Our platform provides the end-to-end visibility, proactive monitoring, and management capabilities you need to ensure your highly available RabbitMQ clusters – whether using Quorum Queues or integrated with other brokers like Kafka or IBM MQ – are performing optimally and supporting your mission-critical microservices. Learn more about how meshIQ can help you master your entire messaging landscape.