So far, Clever Coney Media has been running a single instance of RabbitMQ for all its production needs. Things have been running smoothly, but it's just a matter of time until something bad happens. Though RabbitMQ brokers are extremely stable, a crash is always possible. Losing an instance altogether due to a virtual instance glitch is a likely possibility that can't be ignored if you're running in the cloud. Therefore, it is essential to tackle the broker single point of failure (SPOF) before something bad happens, to prevent losing data, annoying users, and avoiding the dreaded 2 a.m. phone calls.

The good news is that RabbitMQ provides all the necessary features to deal with this issue out of the box. Indeed, RabbitMQ can easily be configured to run in an active/active deployment, where several brokers are engaged in a cluster to act as a single highly-available AMQP middleware. The active/active aspect is essential, because it means that no manual fail-over operation...