Is there a way to keep messages somewhere in RabbitMQ, so that microservices developed in future could consume the old data?

Question

this question is about best practices, and to figure out if I am on the right track. Maybe my thoughts are wrong, maybe there are better alternatives.

• I use RabbitMQ (well - evaluate) for communication between services.
• Some producders deliver data, some consumers consume it. Great.
• For easy understanding let's assume these are messages containing customer addresses.
• Later in development I want to introduce a new consumer, working on customer addresses. And here is my question:

Is it possible, to KEEP messages somewhere, so if there is a new consumer, it will get all data from the beginning? So the new consumer could work on that data, and for the user it seems as this new service was always in place.

Is this possible with rabbitmq? Where can I start? If not: what else would help such a solution?

Answer 1

I have used RabbitMQ, but am not an expert, so can't answer that aspect of your question.

However, what you are considering is very likely a bad idea. If you are using RabbitMQ as a queue, you should be thinking of it a means of communicating between services, not as a source of truth for information.

Somewhere in your enterprise, you (hopefully) have a service and accompanying database that stores customer address data. When a new service is deployed, it should consume the data from that service. This may be via migration script, API query or other means. Once the new service is up to date, it can then start processing new data via the queuing infrastructure.