SpringSource Buys Startup to Scale Messaging in the Cloud

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:42:38 +0000

SpringSource, a division of VMware, has purchased the open-source cloud messaging company behind the RabbitMQ software. The value of the deal was undisclosed, but the purchase of Rabbit Technologies Ltd. is yet another effort by VMware to become the operating system for enterprise clouds (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d) and add value to its commoditized hypervisor. It’s also the latest example of a company selling proprietary software buying up an open-source software company aimed at the cloud.

Cloud providers use RabbitMQ to create a messaging server allowing them to quickly manage the flow of messages between applications. It can also be used to notify users of a web service when content on the site has changed, such as when someone posts a Facebook photo and the service sends an email out notifying all a user’s friends.

The RabbitMQ code was created by Cohesive FT and LShift based on the relatively young AMQP standards effort backed by major banks, Cisco and a handful of smaller companies. As hardware is virtualized, translating some of the network equipment like load balancers into software allow services running on the virtualized hardware to scale better. Hopefully we’ll learn more about SpringSource, RabbitMQ and VMware’s plans for becoming the cloud OS when VMware CEO Paul Maritz speaks at our Structure conference in June.

Introduction to AMQP Messaging with RabbitMQ

View more presentations from Dmitriy Samovskiy.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Joshua Davis

GigaOM » RabbitMQ

SpringSource Buys Startup to Scale Messaging in the Cloud