Chapter 1. Overview

Refer to the article "Red Hat AMQ 7 Supported Configurations" on the Red Hat Customer Portal for current information regarding AMQ Broker supported configurations.

This document uses the following conventions for the sudo command and file paths.

The sudo Command

In this document, sudo is used for any command that requires root privileges. You should always exercise caution when using sudo, as any changes can affect the entire system.

For more information about using sudo, see The sudo Command.

About the Use of File Paths in this Document

In this document, all file paths are valid for Linux, UNIX, and similar operating systems (for example, /home/...). If you are using Microsoft Windows, you should use the equivalent Microsoft Windows paths (for example, C:\Users\...).

Messaging brokers allow you to loosely couple heterogeneous systems together, while typically providing reliability, transactions, and many other features.

Unlike systems based on a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) pattern, messaging systems primarily use an asynchronous message-passing pattern with no tight relationship between requests and responses. Most messaging systems also support a request-response mode, but this is not a primary feature of messaging systems.

Designing systems to be asynchronous from end to end allows you to really take advantage of your hardware resources, minimizing the number of threads blocking on IO operations, and to use your network bandwidth to its full capacity. With an RPC approach you have to wait for a response for each request you make so are limited by the network round-trip time, or latency, of your network. With an asynchronous system you can pipeline flows of messages in different directions, so you are limited by the network bandwidth, not the latency. This typically allows you to create much higher performance applications.

Messaging systems decouple the senders of messages from the consumers of messages. The senders and consumers of messages are completely independent and know nothing of each other. This allows you to create flexible, loosely coupled systems.