Fanout exchanges are basically load balancers right?

Question

I have been learning AMQP using rabbitMQ and I came across this concept called fanout exchanges. From the illustration diagram, all I could see is that it's some kind of load balancer. Could anyone please explain what is it's actual purpose?

Answer 1

I assume that you mean that only one queue will get a message once it arrives to fanout exchange. So from that point of view:

No, I don't think its a load-balancer (I admit that terminology can be confusing).

In Rabbit MQ there are different types of exchanges, its true and fanout exchange is only one type of them. The basic model of Rabbit MQ assumes that you can connect as many queues as you want to the same exchange. Now, all the queues that are connected to the exchange will get the message (Rabbit MQ just replicates the message) - so exchange can't act as a load balancer.

The only difference between the exchange types is an algorithm of matching routing key. It's like a "to" field in a regular envelope. When a message arrives to exchange, it checks the routing key (a.k.a. binding) and depending on type of exchange "finds" to which queue the message should be routed. When queue gets registered to exchange it always uses this binding. It like queue says to the binding "hey, all messages which are supposed to arrive to John Smith (its a routing key), please pass them to me". Then when the message arrives, it always has a "to" field in the envelope - so exchange checks whether the message is intended to be sent to John Smith, and if so - just routes it to the queue.

It's possible that there will be many queues interested to get a message from John Smith, in this case the message will be replicated. As for fanout exchange - it just doesn't pay any attention to the routing key and instead just sends the message to all the connected queues.

Now, there is another abstraction called consumer. Consumers can be connected to the single queue (again, many consumers can be connected to the queue). The trick is that only one consumer can get the message for processing at a time.

So if you want a load balancer - you can use a single queue, connected to your exchange (it can be fanout of course), but then connect many consumers to that queue, and rabbit will send the message to the first consumer (it uses round robin internally to pick the first consumer) - if the consumer can't handle it, the message will be re-queued and rabbit will attempt to send it to another consumer.