“With RabbitMQ, we achieve a very cost-effective, loosely coupled, flexible architecture and an operational mechanism for managing message failures. The message queue saves us a lot of time on bug investigation and maintenance. It’s simple to set up and provides powerful concepts, many which we haven’t used yet, but we feel can solve future needs,” concludes Wiig. “RabbitMQ brings a robust solution we’re comfortable going forward with.” To learn more, visit pivotal.io/products/pivotal-rabbitmq.

1. Every day, almost nine out of ten Norwegians consume media from “the BBC of Norway” or NRK. Also known as the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, this radio and television provider is the largest media house in the country and is run by the government. Headquartered in Oslo, NRK has approximately 3,500 employees. Their website (NRK.no) offers both radio and television services.
About four years ago, NRK began to improve the way people consume radio and television on the web. To do so, they needed to push data from four legacy systems. This included data like title, description, rights, hosts, locations, and multiple pieces of time information for over one million programs. Each day, thousands of content updates take place on some of the 30,000 television and 82,000 radio shows online. According to Erlend Wiig, NRK Software Engineer, “To connect a group of older systems and a new database serving the web, messaging was clearly the answer. Open-source middleware provided a great solution from a budget perspective, but we also needed a tool
we could trust and find support when needed.”
CHALLENGE
Implementing a Flexible, Open-Source Messaging Architecture
NRK needed an intelligent way to create a loosely coupled architecture and allow for system adaptation in the future. They weren’t just looking for high-performance throughput. Since source systems could be updated many times, they also wanted a persistent messaging store to keep track of changes as well as a way to track failures and reprocess them. NRK looked at Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) and Windows Azure Service Bus, but chose RabbitMQ because it had a proven track record, a solid open-source community, and a way to get commercial support. They also knew that RabbitMQ was written in Erlang (a robust, distribution-centric language for a messaging runtime) and backed by Pivotal – a leading provider of
AT-A-GLANCE
Challenges
•
Connecting four legacy systems to a new, web-based system
•
Managing changes to television and radio information for over one million programs
•
Providing flexibility and loose coupling for future system requirements
Solution
•
RabbitMQ
Key Benefits
•
Improved flexibility from a loosely-coupled architecture
•
Simplified operations and easier administration
•
Proven, open-source solution with solid documentation, an active community, and
enterprise support
CASE STUDY
NRK
DELIVERING TV AND RADIO DATA ONLINE WITH RABBITMQ
OVERVIEW
“ We are fans of distributed architectures, and loosely coupling components provides for significant gains when systems evolve and change. This is why placing a message queue like RabbitMQ within the heart of our architecture made sense.”
— Erlend Wiig, Software Engineer, NRK
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CASE STUDY NRK
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Of course, the solution couldn’t create complexity, be difficult
to use, or add risk – a proven solution was needed. Wiig explains,
“Adding messaging to the architecture was, perhaps, beyond the
concept of a minimum viable product, but we knew the approach
would be easier to develop, deploy, manage, and operate than
a tightly coupled set of code between new and old systems.
After messaging was in the architecture, we knew RabbitMQ
was trusted.”
SOLUTION
RabbitMQ Provides a Key Backbone for Media Updates
When data is created or updated, the four source systems
transfer XML to a series of service endpoints built on C# .NET. As
part of a system called ODA, these SOAP and REST-based services
receive, acknowledge, test, and write the message to RabbitMQ.
RabbitMQ then transports the message, and adapters process
the data into standard business objects, persisting the data to an
Oracle database. Ultimately, consumers see this content online.
Since it was difficult to reproduce messages from upstream
systems, NRK wanted to ensure no message was lost. The
company set up RabbitMQ with two clustered disc nodes,
mirrored queues, and a load balancer to provide fail-over. “The
RabbitMQ website provides excellent guides on failover setup,”
states Wiig. “They are easy to follow and make this type of failover
configuration pretty straightforward.”
BUSINESS BENEFITS
RabbitMQ provided the following business benefits to NRK:
Simplified Operations and Easier Administration of Failed
Messages
Operationally, NRK designed their business process and set the
system up to ensure message order was maintained – so that
newer program information is the most current. This also means
that failed messages pause and cause a backup until they are fixed.
NRK extended the RabbitMQ management plugin API to provide a
simple dashboard view of these message backups. Then, they are
able to go to an intact copy of the message, sitting in the queue.
This allows them to troubleshoot issues without digging into logs.
According to Wiig, “RabbitMQ lets us manage message failures in
a much simpler way than before. We can see problems more easily
and respond more quickly.”
Improved Flexibility from Loosely Coupled Architecture
The queue stores messages if downstream consumers are offline
or the database is taken down for maintenance. Again, this
ensures no message is lost, but it also makes the operations and
administration of the overall architecture much easier because
there is less coordination required. They also persist each message
to document storage as if were an event and can replay the events
to rebuild the database.
Recently, NRK needed to generate new subtitles in an iOS format
for mobile viewing of all shows. With RabbitMQ, the company was
able to replay previous messages to the queue with new code in
their adapter. This provided a simple way to transform content
on a massive scale. “We are fans of distributed architectures,
and loosely coupling components provides for significant gains
when systems evolve and change,” Wiig notes. “This is why
placing a message queue like RabbitMQ within the heart of our
architecture made sense.”
CONCLUSION
“With RabbitMQ, we achieve a very cost-effective, loosely
coupled, flexible architecture and an operational mechanism for
managing message failures. The message queue saves us a lot of
time on bug investigation and maintenance. It’s simple to set up
and provides powerful concepts, many which we haven’t used yet,
but we feel can solve future needs,” concludes Wiig. “RabbitMQ
brings a robust solution we’re comfortable going forward with.”
LEARN MORE
To learn more about our products, services and solutions, visit us
at pivotal.io.
“ RabbitMQ lets us manage message failures in a much
simpler way than before. We can see problems more
easily and respond more quickly.”
— Erlend Wiig, Software Engineer, NRK