Message Delivery Mechanisms

Despite the global nature of destinations and consumers in a cluster, a home broker has special responsibilities with respect to both its producers and consumers:

• A producer’s home broker is responsible for persisting and routing messages originating from that producer, for logging, for managing transactions, and for processing acknowledgements from consuming clients across the cluster.

• A consumer’s home broker is responsible for persisting information about consumers, for delivering remotely produced messages to the consumer, for letting a producer’s home broker know whether the consumer is still available, and for letting a producer's home broker know when each message has been successfully consumed.

The cluster connection service transports payload messages, when needed, from destinations on a home broker to destinations on remote brokers. It also transports control messages, such as client acknowledgements, from remote brokers back to a home broker. The cluster attempts to minimize message traffic across the cluster. For example, it only sends a message to a remote broker if the remote broker is home to a consumer of the message. If a remote broker has two identical consumers for the same destination (for example two topic subscribers), the message is sent over the wire only once. (You can further reduce traffic by setting a destination property specifying that delivery to local consumers has priority over delivery to remote consumers.)

If secure message delivery is required, you can configure a cluster to also provide secure, encrypted delivery of messages between brokers.

As a result of the cluster delivery mechanisms described above, each broker in a cluster stores different persistent messages and maintains different state information. If a broker fails, the mechanisms for recovering its persistent information depends on the cluster model being used, as described in subsequent sections.