ZeroMQ Driver Deployment Guide

Introduction

0MQ (also known as ZeroMQ or zmq) is embeddable networking library but acts like a concurrency framework. It gives you sockets that carry atomic messages across various transports like in-process, inter-process, TCP, and multicast. You can connect sockets N-to-N with patterns like fan-out, pub-sub, task distribution, and request-reply. It’s fast enough to be the fabric for clustered products. Its asynchronous I/O model gives you scalable multi-core applications, built as asynchronous message-processing tasks. It has a score of language APIs and runs on most operating systems.

Originally the zero in 0MQ was meant as “zero broker” and (as close to) “zero latency” (as possible). Since then, it has come to encompass different goals: zero administration, zero cost, and zero waste. More generally, “zero” refers to the culture of minimalism that permeates the project.

More detail regarding ZeroMQ library is available from the specification.

Abstract

Currently, ZeroMQ is one of the RPC backend drivers in oslo.messaging. ZeroMQ can be the only RPC driver across the OpenStack cluster. This document provides deployment information for this driver in oslo_messaging.

Other than AMQP-based drivers, like RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ doesn’t have any central brokers in oslo.messaging, instead, each host (running OpenStack services) is both ZeroMQ client and server. As a result, each host needs to listen to a certain TCP port for incoming connections and directly connect to other hosts simultaneously.

Topics are used to identify the destination for a ZeroMQ RPC call. There are two types of topics, bare topics and directed topics. Bare topics look like ‘compute’, while directed topics look like ‘compute.machine1’.

Scenario

Assuming the following systems as a goal.

+--------+
| Client |
+----+---+
     |
-----+---------+-----------------------+---------------------
               |                       |
      +--------+------------+  +-------+----------------+
      | Controller Node     |  | Compute Node           |
      |  Nova               |  |  Neutron               |
      |  Keystone           |  |  Nova                  |
      |  Glance             |  |   nova-compute         |
      |  Neutron            |  |  Ceilometer            |
      |  Cinder             |  |  Oslo-zmq-receiver     |
      |  Ceilometer         |  +------------------------+
      |  Oslo-zmq-receiver  |
      |  Horizon            |
      +---------------------+

Configuration

Enabling (mandatory)

To enable the driver, in the section [DEFAULT] of the conf file, the ‘rpc_backend’ flag must be set to ‘zmq’ and the ‘rpc_zmq_host’ flag must be set to the hostname of the current node.

[DEFAULT]
rpc_backend = zmq
rpc_zmq_host = {hostname}

Match Making (mandatory)

The ZeroMQ driver implements a matching capability to discover hosts available for communication when sending to a bare topic. This allows broker-less communications.

The MatchMaker is pluggable and it provides two different MatchMaker classes.

DummyMatchMaker: default matchmaker driver for all-in-one scenario (messages are sent to itself).

RedisMatchMaker: loads the hash table from a remote Redis server, supports dynamic host/topic registrations, host expiration, and hooks for consuming applications to acknowledge or neg-acknowledge topic.host service availability.

To set the MatchMaker class, use option ‘rpc_zmq_matchmaker’ in [DEFAULT].

rpc_zmq_matchmaker = dummy

or:

rpc_zmq_matchmaker = redis

To specify the Redis server for RedisMatchMaker, use options in [matchmaker_redis] of each project.

[matchmaker_redis]
host = 127.0.0.1
port = 6379
password = None

In order to cleanup redis storage from expired records (e.g. target listener goes down) TTL may be applied for keys. Configure ‘zmq_target_expire’ option which is 120 (seconds) by default. The option is related not specifically to redis so it is also defined in [DEFAULT] section. If option value is <= 0 then keys don’t expire and live forever in the storage.

MatchMaker Data Source (mandatory)

MatchMaker data source is stored in files or Redis server discussed in the previous section. How to make up the database is the key issue for making ZeroMQ driver work.

If deploying the RedisMatchMaker, a Redis server is required. Each (K, V) pair stored in Redis is that the key is a base topic and the corresponding values are hostname arrays to be sent to.

Proxy for fanout publishing

Each machine running OpenStack services, or sending RPC messages, should run the ‘oslo-messaging-zmq-broker’ daemon.

Fanout-based patterns like CAST+Fanout and notifications always use proxy as they act over PUB/SUB, ‘use_pub_sub’ - defaults to True. If not using PUB/SUB (use_pub_sub = False) then fanout will be emulated over direct DEALER/ROUTER unicast which is possible but less efficient and therefore is not recommended. In a case of direct DEALER/ROUTER unicast proxy is not needed.

This option can be set in [DEFAULT] section.

For example:

use_pub_sub = True

In case of using the broker all publishers (clients) talk to servers over the local broker connecting to it via IPC transport.

The IPC runtime directory, ‘rpc_zmq_ipc_dir’, can be set in [DEFAULT] section.

For example:

rpc_zmq_ipc_dir = /var/run/openstack

The parameters for the script oslo-messaging-zmq-receiver should be:

oslo-messaging-zmq-broker
    --config-file /etc/oslo/zeromq.conf
    --log-file /var/log/oslo/zmq-broker.log

You can specify ZeroMQ options in /etc/oslo/zeromq.conf if necessary.

Listening Address (optional)

All services bind to an IP address or Ethernet adapter. By default, all services bind to ‘*’, effectively binding to 0.0.0.0. This may be changed with the option ‘rpc_zmq_bind_address’ which accepts a wildcard, IP address, or Ethernet adapter.

This configuration can be set in [DEFAULT] section.

For example:

rpc_zmq_bind_address = *

Currently zmq driver uses dynamic port binding mechanism, which means that each listener will allocate port of a random number. Ports range is controlled by two options ‘rpc_zmq_min_port’ and ‘rpc_zmq_max_port’. Change them to restrict current service’s port binding range. ‘rpc_zmq_bind_port_retries’ controls number of retries before ‘ports range exceeded’ failure.

For example:

rpc_zmq_min_port = 9050
rpc_zmq_max_port = 10050
rpc_zmq_bind_port_retries = 100

DevStack Support

ZeroMQ driver has been supported by DevStack. The configuration is as follows:

ENABLED_SERVICES+=,-rabbit,zeromq
ZEROMQ_MATCHMAKER=redis

In local.conf [localrc] section need to enable zmq plugin which lives in devstack-plugin-zmq repository.

For example:

enable_plugin zmq https://github.com/openstack/devstack-plugin-zmq.git

Current Status

The current development status of ZeroMQ driver is shown in wiki.