activemq load balancing using elastic load balancer?

Question

We have a set of 30 producers and 30 consumers consuming messages from single ActiveMQ instance currently. All Producers write to 25 queues and all consumers can consume from the queues. There is no message routing or failover in place as of now. We would like to make it horizontally scalable with out any code changes on producers & consumers.

One idea we've had is using two ELB's, one before producers and one before consumers so we would add/remove activemq's at will. I'm unable to find any such documentation or material online for such setup, and would like to know if any one worked on such setup or if its possible in the first place. Any suggestions to make the system horizontally scalable by adding nodes at will will be helpful

Answer 1

We went ahead with using automatic broker cluster feature found with ActiveMQ 5.4 or greater. This article has been really helpful in understanding this setup.

Answer 2

Take a look at networks of brokers. This will let you add activemq instances (presumably using multicast discovery) on the fly. You'll then need to dynamically update the ELB to include the new instances. ActiveMq networks of brokers allow consumers and producers to be connected anywhere on the network and exchange traffic.