Message bus over ZeroMQ

Question

I'm going to implement a distributed message bus over ZeroMQ and I'm trying to make it as efficient as possible. My requirements are:

• multiple processes are connected to a bus, some of them are on the same machine, some not.
• processes can subscribe to some topics
• unfortunately, no multicast (it is not supported in the production environment - Amazon)
• I need multilanguage soultion (at least for C++, Haskell and Python)

Approaches I'm considering are:

1. Directory Service + Mesh topology

• there is a single Directory Service which has a list of all connected processes and their addresses.
• each process connects to DS on start and asks for addresses of others
• each process has a Pub and Sub sockets connected to all other processes (mesh topology)

2. Broker

• all processes are connected to a broker which distributes messages using Pub socket.

Are there any other/better architectures to use with ZeroMQ to create such message bus?

Answer 1

I suggest you to have a look to nanomsg, which has a built-in BUS topology and some other interesting ones like SURVEY. It is a library by Martin Sustrik the original zmq author.

You can find some discussion about BUS on Martin Sustrik blog: http://250bpm.com/blog:17