LavinMQ: Building an open-source message broker for developers
Written by: Elin Vinka
How a customer challenge led to the creation of a new message broker and our first appearance at Open Source Summit Amsterdam.
As open-source exhibitors for the first time, LavinMQ has just returned from Open Source Summit in Netherlands. A three-day conference with an impressive speaker list and exhibitors - all focused on showcasing and diving into news and innovations from the community. The conference is one of the Linux Foundation’s events and took place in the beautiful and sunny city of Amsterdam.
LavinMQ’s open-source journey started over a decade ago with the hosting service CloudAMQP. At the time of LavinMQ’s first release, we had been hosting another open source message broker, RabbitMQ, for over 8 years.
At one point in history, a customer issue led us to build a solution that began to look very much like a message broker. In short, the issue itself originated from PHP clients that in a very inefficient and troublesome way connected to RabbitMQ using short-lived TCP connections for each message.
Instead of quick fixes, our solution was to build a proxy – a middle layer that would maintain a single, persistent connection to handle communication with RabbitMQ. This solution reduced the connection overhead and solved the CPU issues, but it also made us thinking…
…how much harder would it be to build a complete message broker ourselves?
With our proven understanding of the AMQP protocol and the rewarding experience of developing the AMQP proxy, we decided to continue our development journey.
In 2020, we released the first version of LavinMQ - as open source. Built in-house and with experience and learnings from helping our customers with their setups. Also important to our story is that while developing the first version of LavinMQ, we were running hosted Apache Kafka and Mosquitto brokers. This allowed us to cherry-pick the best features from across the messaging landscape.
For this reason, LavinMQ features built-in streaming and replayability - inspired by Kafka, as well as support for MQTT brings the fast communication for IoT. The fact that we made LavinMQ very lightweight and fast also means that it is resource-efficient.
When developing something yourself, you get to decide what is the most important. For us, developer experience is one of our top priorities. We simply aimed for LavinMQ to be the fastest and easiest way for developers to start sending messages. And the name? Lavin is Swedish for avalanche. Fast and powerful.
So, our story begins with open-source message brokers and building LavinMQ with that same mindset was the only natural choice. We are big believers in the transparent and collaborative open source communities and have built our company around its philosophy - from tools we use to how we build.
We welcome contributors of all kinds to help evolve LavinMQ into an even better product. The Open Source Summit connected us with a whole community, and even though this was our first time, it will not be our last. See you next year #OSSummit! LavinMQ is also available as a hosted option on our hosting service, CloudAMQP, where we continually set up and maintain servers for companies worldwide.
Curious to see where we’re headed next? Join our Slack and Sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop, and check out our conference schedule to see where we’ll be. We’d love to meet you along the way.
All the best