The WLCG Messaging Service and its Future

Abstract

Enterprise messaging is seen as an attractive mechanism to simplify and extend several portions of the Grid middleware, from low level monitoring to experiments dashboards. The production messaging service currently used by WLCG includes four tightly coupled brokers operated by EGI (running Apache ActiveMQ and designed to host the Grid operational tools such as SAM) as well as two dedicated services for ATLAS-DDM and experiments dashboards (currently also running Apache ActiveMQ). In the future, this service is expected to grow in numbers of applications supported, brokers and technologies.The WLCG Messaging Roadmap identified three areas with room for improvement (security, scalability and availability/reliability) as well as ten practical recommendations to address them. This paper describes a messaging service architecture that is in line with these recommendations as well as a software architecture based on reusable components that ease interactions with the messaging service. These two architectures will support the growth of the WLCG messaging service.