RocketMQ Proxy is a stateless component that makes full use of the newly introduced pop consumption mechanism to achieve stateless consumption behavior. gRPC protocol is supported by Proxy now and all the message types including normal, fifo, transaction and delay are supported via pop consumption mode. Proxy will translate incoming traffic into customized Remoting protocol to access Broker and Namesrv.

Proxy also handles SSL, authorization/authentication and logging/tracing/metrics and is in charge of connection management and traffic governance.

gRPC combined with Protocol Buffer makes it easy to implement clients with both java and other programming languages while the server side doesn't need extra work to support different programming languages. See rocketmq-clients for more information.

With Proxy served as a traffic interface, it's convenient to implement multiple protocols upon proxy. gRPC protocol is implemented first and the customized Remoting protocol will be implemented later. HTTP/1.1 will also be taken into consideration.

RocketMQ Proxy has two deployment modes: Cluster mode and Local mode. With both modes, Pop mode is natively supported in Proxy.

While in Cluster mode, Proxy is an independent cluster that communicates with Broker with remote procedure call. In this scenario, Proxy acts as a stateless computing component while Broker is a stateful component with local storage. This form of deployment introduces the architecture of separation of computing and storage for RocketMQ.

Due to the separation of computing and storage, RocketMQ Proxy can be scaled out indefinitely in Cluster mode to handle traffic peak while Broker can focus on storage engine and high availability.

Proxy in Local mode has more similarity with RocketMQ 4.x version, which is easily deployed or upgraded for current RocketMQ users. With Local mode, Proxy deployed with Broker in the same process with inter-process communication so the network overhead is reduced compared to Cluster mode.

See Proxy Deployment

• rocketmq-apis: Common communication protocol between server and client.
• rocketmq-clients: Collection of Polyglot Clients for Apache RocketMQ.
• RIP-37: New and Unified APIs: RocketMQ proposal of new and unified APIs crossing different languages.
• RIP-39: Support gRPC protocol: RocketMQ proposal of gRPC protocol support.