I’ve just returned from the CamelOne Open Source Integration Conference in Boston where I was invited as a speaker to present how Lynden is using ActiveMQ as part of its freight tracking infrastructure.  As expected, there were a number of big announcements and very interesting projects that speakers from all over the world showcased during the 2 day conference.  Here are few new projects/applications that I found may be useful here at Lynden in particular.

I thought this was by far the most interesting project announced during the conference.  Fuse Fabric is a distributed configuration, management and provisioning system for Fuse ESB, Fuse Message Broker and the Apache open source integration solutions (ActiveMQ, Camel, CXF, Karaf & ServiceMix).  Basically providing a single point where configuration information for brokers (and other applications) can go to retrieve their config info.   Under the covers it is making use of Apache ZooKeeper to store the cluster configuration and node registration.

We are currently only running 1 production message broker, but we have 8 message brokers in our test environment.  Fuse Fabric could greatly reduce the overhead of managing the configuration of those brokers.

    Apache ZooKeeper
As it seems at these conferences, there are always ideas flying around among the attendees and I always seem to obtain just as many new ideas attending sessions as I do talking to other architects and developers outside the sessions.  I was explaining to someone the challenge we have with managing the configurations of our 70+ web applications and services in our production, staging and test environments.  His immediate response was to take a look at Apache ZooKeeper.  They had been using it the past few months for managing configuration of multiple environments with good success.  As mentioned above, Fuse Fabric makes use of Apache ZooKeeper, and I’m curious to learn if Fabric can be used beyond the integration apps it mentions (ESB, MQ, etc), and also used for things such as our web applications and services.

Fuse Management Console
Provides a toolf for managing large-scale deployments of Fuse ESB Enterprise and Fuse MQ Enterprise.  A FuseSource subscription is required to install the console, which provides the following benefits:

• Simplified management– key status metrics and commands are accessible from a unified, centralized console
• Automatic provisioning– dependencies between components and include files are tracked and managed
• Profile management– simplify the creation and management of customized brokers by defining configuration profiles
• Automated updates– updates to a single component are automatically deployed to the appropriate brokers based on the profile
• Local or Cloud deployment – your integration infrastructure can be deployed and managed locally or in the Cloud

MQTT protocol support in ActiveMQ 5.6
MQTT protocol has come a little late for Lynden since we already have a solution for connecting Windows CE devices to ActiveMQ.  MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a machine to machine protocol design as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport.  ActiveMQ 5.6 and Apollo 1.0 will both support MQTT.

Fuse HQ
Fuse HQ is a SOA management and monitoring system and is available with a FuseSource support subscription.  Fuse HQ takes advantage of the JMX-based reporting capabilities of the Fuse products.  Some of the features Fuse HQ provides are:

Monitor systems– comprehensive cross-stack dashboard make it easy to check the health of systems and services

• Role-based access controls for managing user visibility
• Visually review relationships between FuseSource servers and other managed resources
• Explore and generate reports of real-time and historic logs, configurations, and events
• Impact analysis and change control based on configuration tracking
• Collect, chart and view real-time and historic metrics from hardware, network and applications without invasive instrumentation
• Auto-discover hardware and software attributes including configuration, version numbers, memory, CPU, disk and network devices
• Distributed monitoring allows for linear scalability of Fuse HQ server

Manage systems– execute control operations to manage the FuseSource environment

• Role-based access controls for managing user permissions
• External authentication leverages existing LDAP or Kerberos directories
• Automate maintenance activities with scheduled controls and conditional responses to alerts
• High availability allows multiple Fuse HQ servers to assume workloads in the event of a server failure

Intelligent Alerts– definable alerts proactively identify problems before they occur

• Follow-the-sun assignments routs alerts to the appropriate person based on the time of day and users’ scheduled availability
• Integrate traps with existing IT operations suite
• Define alerts once and apply to large, global resource groups
• Alerts can be multiconditional, role-based and group based, and trigger recovery processes
• Generate alerts on changes in configuration or key attributes of any managed resource

twitter: @RobTerp