RabbitMQ tutorial - Remote procedure call (RPC)

Remote procedure call (RPC) ​

(using the Pika Python client) ​

Prerequisites ​

As with other Python tutorials, we will use the Pika RabbitMQ client version 1.0.0 .

What This Tutorial Focuses On ​

In the second tutorial we learned how to use Work Queues to distribute time-consuming tasks among multiple workers.

But what if we need to run a function on a remote computer and wait for the result? Well, that's a different story. This pattern is commonly known as Remote Procedure Call or RPC .

In this tutorial we're going to use RabbitMQ to build an RPC system: a client and a scalable RPC server. As we don't have any time-consuming tasks that are worth distributing, we're going to create a dummy RPC service that returns Fibonacci numbers.

Client interface ​

To illustrate how an RPC service could be used we're going to create a simple client class. It's going to expose a method named call which sends an RPC request and blocks until the answer is received:

fibonacci_rpc = FibonacciRpcClient()
result = fibonacci_rpc.call(4)
print(f"fib(4) is {result}")

A note on RPC ​

Although RPC is a pretty common pattern in computing, it's often criticised. The problems arise when a programmer is not aware whether a function call is local or if it's a slow RPC. Confusions like that result in an unpredictable system and adds unnecessary complexity to debugging. Instead of simplifying software, misused RPC can result in unmaintainable spaghetti code.

Bearing that in mind, consider the following advice:

When in doubt avoid RPC. If you can, you should use an asynchronous pipeline - instead of RPC-like blocking, results are asynchronously pushed to a next computation stage.

Callback queue ​

In general doing RPC over RabbitMQ is easy. A client sends a request message and a server replies with a response message. In order to receive a response the client needs to send a 'callback' queue address with the request. Let's try it:

result = channel.queue_declare(queue='', exclusive=True)
callback_queue = result.method.queue

channel.basic_publish(exchange='',
                      routing_key='rpc_queue',
                      properties=pika.BasicProperties(
                            reply_to = callback_queue,
                            ),
                      body=request)

# ... and some code to read a response message from the callback_queue ...

Message properties ​

The AMQP 0-9-1 protocol predefines a set of 14 properties that go with a message. Most of the properties are rarely used, with the exception of the following:

Correlation id ​

In the method presented above we suggest creating a callback queue for every RPC request. That's pretty inefficient, but fortunately there is a better way - let's create a single callback queue per client.

That raises a new issue, having received a response in that queue it's not clear to which request the response belongs. That's when the correlation_id property is used. We're going to set it to a unique value for every request. Later, when we receive a message in the callback queue we'll look at this property, and based on that we'll be able to match a response with a request. If we see an unknown correlation_id value, we may safely discard the message - it doesn't belong to our requests.

You may ask, why should we ignore unknown messages in the callback queue, rather than failing with an error? It's due to a possibility of a race condition on the server side. Although unlikely, it is possible that the RPC server will die just after sending us the answer, but before sending an acknowledgment message for the request. If that happens, the restarted RPC server will process the request again. That's why on the client we must handle the duplicate responses gracefully, and the RPC should ideally be idempotent.

Summary ​

Our RPC will work like this:

Putting it all together ​

rpc_server.py ( source )

#!/usr/bin/env python
import pika

connection = pika.BlockingConnection(
    pika.ConnectionParameters(host='localhost'))

channel = connection.channel()

channel.queue_declare(queue='rpc_queue')

def fib(n):
    if n == 0:
        return 0
    elif n == 1:
        return 1
    else:
        return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)

def on_request(ch, method, props, body):
    n = int(body)

    print(f" [.] fib({n})")
    response = fib(n)

    ch.basic_publish(exchange='',
                     routing_key=props.reply_to,
                     properties=pika.BasicProperties(correlation_id = \
                                                         props.correlation_id),
                     body=str(response))
    ch.basic_ack(delivery_tag=method.delivery_tag)

channel.basic_qos(prefetch_count=1)
channel.basic_consume(queue='rpc_queue', on_message_callback=on_request)

print(" [x] Awaiting RPC requests")
channel.start_consuming()

The server code is rather straightforward:

rpc_client.py ( source )

#!/usr/bin/env python
import pika
import uuid


class FibonacciRpcClient(object):

    def __init__(self):
        self.connection = pika.BlockingConnection(
            pika.ConnectionParameters(host='localhost'))

        self.channel = self.connection.channel()

        result = self.channel.queue_declare(queue='', exclusive=True)
        self.callback_queue = result.method.queue

        self.channel.basic_consume(
            queue=self.callback_queue,
            on_message_callback=self.on_response,
            auto_ack=True)

        self.response = None
        self.corr_id = None

    def on_response(self, ch, method, props, body):
        if self.corr_id == props.correlation_id:
            self.response = body

    def call(self, n):
        self.response = None
        self.corr_id = str(uuid.uuid4())
        self.channel.basic_publish(
            exchange='',
            routing_key='rpc_queue',
            properties=pika.BasicProperties(
                reply_to=self.callback_queue,
                correlation_id=self.corr_id,
            ),
            body=str(n))
        while self.response is None:
            self.connection.process_data_events(time_limit=None)
        return int(self.response)


fibonacci_rpc = FibonacciRpcClient()

print(" [x] Requesting fib(30)")
response = fibonacci_rpc.call(30)
print(f" [.] Got {response}")

The client code is slightly more involved:

Our RPC service is now ready. We can start the server:

python rpc_server.py
# => [x] Awaiting RPC requests

To request a fibonacci number run the client:

python rpc_client.py
# => [x] Requesting fib(30)

The presented design is not the only possible implementation of an RPC service, but it has some important advantages:

Our code is still pretty simplistic and doesn't try to solve more complex (but important) problems, like: