Managed RabbitMQ
Managed RabbitMQ services from AceMQ start with escalation cover: a senior RabbitMQ engineer behind your team (Stage 1) or watching the broker alongside it (Stage 2), with a 15-minute emergency response, 24/7. Full operations is the upgrade. At Stage 3 AceMQ runs RabbitMQ in your own AWS or Azure account or data centre, and at Stage 4 on ours. Stages 1 and 2 leave the pager with your team; Stages 3 and 4 take it.
The only partner with direct RabbitMQ core team access
Customers
Partners
Named by the RabbitMQ Core Team
AceMQ is the Featured Authorized Partner for RabbitMQ, named by the RabbitMQ Core Engineering Team — the people who write and maintain the broker. That recognition covers RabbitMQ support, licensing and professional services, and it makes AceMQ the only RabbitMQ partner with a direct line to the core team. When an escalation needs an answer that is not in the documentation, it does not stop at a support tier.
You do not have to take our word for it — RabbitMQ lists AceMQ on its own site.
See AceMQ listed on rabbitmq.com (opens in a new tab)Is This You?
Stage 1: your team runs RabbitMQ well and wants a specialist on call when something breaks
Stage 2: you already have monitoring, still get surprised, and want early warning without giving up control of the cluster
Stage 3: nobody wants the RabbitMQ pager, and compliance or data residency keeps the brokers in your own account
Stage 4: you would rather not own cloud accounts, Kubernetes or an on-call rota for RabbitMQ at all
The person who understood the cluster has left, and upgrades keep drifting further behind
CVE patching happens when someone remembers, rather than on a schedule you could show an auditor
Your platform team is small enough that one incident consumes a sprint
Outcomes
Concrete state changes, not deliverable counts. This is what actually differs about your RabbitMQ estate when the engagement closes.
Before
RabbitMQ is everyone's responsibility, which means it is nobody's. Upgrades slip a year at a time.
After
A named senior engineer owns the platform, with upgrades planned on a published cadence and executed in your change windows.
Before
Alerts fire into a channel where whoever is awake picks them up, with no defined response time.
After
Alerts route to our on-call rota under a contracted 15-minute emergency response, with your team looped in rather than woken.
Before
A managed cloud service is the only alternative on the table, and it means your messages leave your account.
After
At Stage 3 the brokers stay on your infrastructure, in your VPC, under your data-residency rules, and we operate them. At Stage 4 we host them, if you would rather own nothing.
Before
No one can answer an auditor asking when the last CVE was assessed and patched.
After
Patch and CVE assessment on a documented schedule, with a written record per cluster you can hand to audit.
Before
Handing the platform back would mean starting from nothing, so you are locked in by ignorance rather than contract.
After
Runbooks, topology documentation and monitoring stay yours throughout. Exit is a handover, not a rebuild.
Scope
We instrument the cluster properly — queue depth, consumer utilisation, memory and disk alarms, partition detection, Erlang process and file-descriptor headroom — and take the pager. Alerts reach an engineer who already knows your topology rather than someone reading it for the first time at 3am.
RabbitMQ and Erlang patching on a defined cadence, with CVE assessment against the versions you actually run. Where you are on a series the community no longer patches, coverage continues through our extended LTS support rather than forcing an upgrade you have not scheduled.
A published upgrade path rather than a version that drifts. We plan the hops, test against your workload, and execute in your change window — including the classic-to-quorum queue migration and the feature-flag sequencing that trips most in-house upgrades.
Ongoing capacity review against real throughput, not the sizing someone guessed at go-live. Prefetch, queue type, memory watermark and disk sizing revisited as the workload changes, with the reasoning written down.
Where RabbitMQ runs on Kubernetes we operate the Cluster Operator, persistent volumes, network policy for inter-node Erlang distribution, and rolling updates that keep quorum. On EKS, AKS, GKE, OpenShift or your own hardware.
Topology changes, new vhosts, policy and permission changes handled as routine requests. Escalation paths and change windows are agreed during onboarding and written into your runbook, so nobody works out who to call during an incident. Where an issue needs the people who build RabbitMQ, AceMQ escalates directly to the RabbitMQ core team, access no other services partner has.
The Engagement
Every phase has a defined duration and a concrete artifact handed over at the end of it. You always know what stage you're in and what you've received.
We establish what you are actually running before we take responsibility for it. Version and patch position, topology, queue types, known faults, monitoring gaps and the failure modes your team already lives with. Most estates we take over are inherited or undocumented; none of that is a barrier, but discovering it during the first incident would be.
You receive
Monitoring goes in, alert routing is agreed, escalation paths and change windows are defined, and access is scoped to the minimum we need. We remediate anything the assessment flagged as an active risk, then run a shadow period in which we watch alongside your team, and only then take primary on-call.
You receive
We run it. Incident response under the contracted SLA, patching and CVE assessment on schedule, capacity reviewed as the workload moves, and routine change handled as it arrives. Your team keeps building on RabbitMQ instead of maintaining it.
You receive
Every quarter we review what broke, what changed and what the workload is doing to capacity. Documentation and runbooks stay current and stay yours — the test of a managed service is whether you could take it back, and we keep that answer yes.
You receive
Managed RabbitMQ is a ladder with four stages, and each stage moves one more responsibility from your team to AceMQ: first diagnosis, then early warning, then running the brokers, then owning the platform they run on. AceMQ runs RabbitMQ for 130+ enterprise customers in 26+ countries, and the same named senior engineers sit behind every rung, with no tier-1 triage layer to get past. A RabbitMQ managed service provider can sit on any rung. The two questions that decide the stage are who holds the pager and where the brokers run. Most teams are best served by starting with escalation cover (Stages 1 and 2) and moving to full operations (Stages 3 and 4) only when carrying the pager becomes the problem.
| Stage 1: Reactive support | Stage 2: Proactive support | Stage 3: Managed on your infrastructure | Stage 4: Managed on AceMQ infrastructure | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who holds the pager | You | You. AceMQ raises problems early and advises | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Where RabbitMQ runs | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure | Your cloud account, Kubernetes cluster or data centre | AceMQ infrastructure |
| Access model | On request, only while working a ticket | Monitoring inside your boundary. You approve any action | A scoped role AceMQ assumes under your audit trail, with no shared human accounts | Endpoints and a management console. No access to your estate is needed |
| What AceMQ does | Expert response to tickets under the contracted SLA, escalation, health checks, CVE alerts | Stage 1, plus watching the broker from the inside through AceMQ's in-broker observability plugin and managing the alerts. Available now | Monitoring, patching, upgrades, capacity, change execution and on-call | Hosts and operates the cluster, from a shared sandbox to dedicated multi-node production |
| Typical buyer | A capable platform team that wants a specialist safety net, not an operator | A team with existing monitoring that still gets surprised, or a regulated team that wants early warning without giving up control | No RabbitMQ specialist on staff, and compliance or residency rules keep the cluster in its own account | A team that wants a cloud-broker experience with RabbitMQ specialists behind it and is not bound to its own account |
| Commitments | Contracted response times, including a 15-minute emergency response | The same contracted response times | Response and restoration commitments under contract | Response and restoration commitments for infrastructure AceMQ controls |
AceMQ is the expert on call. Your team runs the brokers and holds the pager. When something breaks, or when you need a specialist beside you, you raise a ticket and an AceMQ engineer responds under the contracted SLA, with escalation, health checks and CVE alerts. Access to your environment happens on request, only while a ticket is being worked.
Stage 2 is available now. It keeps your infrastructure and your pager, and adds AceMQ looking inside the broker. AceMQ's in-broker observability plugin watches the cluster from the inside, and an AceMQ engineer manages the alerts, and tells you what is wrong and what to do before users notice. No message payloads or credentials leave your cluster. If you allow remediation, each action needs a person on your side to approve it, one action at a time. Dashboards show the numbers; Stage 2 puts an engineer behind them.
AceMQ takes the pager and operates the brokers where they already run, in your cloud account, VPC, Kubernetes cluster or data centre. The data, the cloud bill and the ability to leave stay yours. The sections above describe this stage in detail: monitoring and on-call, patching, upgrades, capacity, change and the phased handover. An existing or inherited estate is taken over as it is, on the versions and plugins it already uses, after the assessment.
Stages 1 and 2 are AceMQ's RabbitMQ support, also covered on the support page linked under Related below. The sections that follow cover running RabbitMQ in your AWS or Azure account and Stage 4.
The same four stages cover Kafka, Redis and Valkey; they are compared across technologies on managed open-source operations
On AWS and Azure the choice is usually framed as the cloud provider's managed broker against running RabbitMQ yourself. There is a third option: RabbitMQ runs in your own AWS account or Azure subscription, as it would if you ran it, and AceMQ supports or operates it there. Escalation cover (Stages 1 and 2) puts a specialist behind your team. Full operations (Stage 3) moves the pager to AceMQ. The data, the account and the cloud bill stay yours either way.
| Who runs the broker | Where it runs | What to check | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ | AWS, in scheduled maintenance windows | AWS only | The supported versions and plugins are AWS's list, and streams are not supported |
| RabbitMQ on your AWS account (EC2 or EKS), with AceMQ support | Your team. AceMQ answers tickets (Stage 1) and watches the broker (Stage 2) | Your AWS account | You choose versions, plugins and queue types, and you keep the pager |
| RabbitMQ on your AWS account, managed by AceMQ | AceMQ (Stage 3) | Your AWS account | AceMQ assumes a scoped role under your audit trail. The cloud bill stays yours |
| RabbitMQ on your Azure subscription (VMs or AKS), with AceMQ support or management | Your team at Stages 1 and 2, AceMQ at Stage 3 | Your Azure subscription | Microsoft has no first-party managed RabbitMQ, so this is the route that keeps RabbitMQ itself |
| Azure Service Bus or Event Hubs | Microsoft | Azure only | Neither is RabbitMQ. Moving to them means changing every producer and consumer |
Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ is AWS's own managed broker. AWS performs maintenance and version upgrades in a maintenance window and publishes broker metrics to CloudWatch, and it runs only in AWS. It fits a standard AMQP workload that lives entirely in AWS. It stops fitting when the estate needs RabbitMQ streams, a plugin outside AWS's list, a version AWS does not offer, or a second cloud. Because Amazon MQ is still RabbitMQ, moving a workload to or from it usually means new endpoints and credentials rather than new code. AceMQ supports and operates the alternative: RabbitMQ on EC2 or EKS in your own AWS account, on the versions and plugins you already use.
The options side by side, with the Amazon MQ limits and the hosted platforms: Managed RabbitMQ options compared
Microsoft's own messaging services are Azure Service Bus and Event Hubs, and neither is RabbitMQ. Managed RabbitMQ on Azure comes from a specialist host, or from running RabbitMQ yourself on virtual machines or AKS. If the brokers have to stay in your Azure subscription, AceMQ supports them there at Stages 1 and 2 and operates them there at Stage 3, including the Cluster Operator, persistent volumes and network policy on AKS.
The trade-offs of each Azure route are in Running RabbitMQ on Azure: the real hosting options
Not every team wants the brokers in its own account. At Stage 4 AceMQ hosts and operates RabbitMQ on our infrastructure, with the same emergency response as the other stages and without the cloud account, the Kubernetes cluster or the on-call rota on your side. You get endpoints and a management console. It is the alternative to a managed cloud broker for teams that want RabbitMQ specialists behind the console rather than a generic support contract. Every plan includes the cluster, the console, definition backups and platform patching.
Go-live readiness is part of every production plan. We benchmark your actual workload, including message sizes, fan-out, consumer behaviour and failure injection, before the cluster carries traffic, so sizing is measured rather than guessed. Change reviews, upgrade regression reports and migration or version-rescue engagements are available on top for estates arriving from older RabbitMQ releases or from another broker.
Pricing
Stages 1 and 2 are priced by the cover you need. Stage 3 is priced by the size of the estate and the commitments you need. Stage 4 plans are priced per cluster shape, and annual, multi-year and multi-cluster commitments discount from list. Tell us the workload and we will recommend a stage and reply to your quote request within 1 hour.
Whichever stage you choose, a fully managed RabbitMQ service covers the same operating ground. This is what that ground looks like in practice, and what to ask any RabbitMQ service provider about each part.
A RabbitMQ cluster is scaled by adding nodes and by sizing queues and consumers, not with one dial. Quorum queues replicate each message to a majority of the nodes that host them, with three replicas as the default, so a three-node cluster spread across multiple availability zones keeps serving when a node or a zone is lost. A managed service plans scaling against measured throughput, CPU, memory and disk instead of waiting for an alarm, and reviews it as the workload changes.
The management plugin gives an HTTP API and a browser UI for management and monitoring of RabbitMQ nodes and clusters, on port 15672 by default. The Prometheus plugin exposes metrics on port 15692, and the RabbitMQ team publishes prebuilt Grafana dashboards for them. In a managed service those become inputs to an on-call engineer's response, rather than screens somebody has to remember to watch.
RabbitMQ speaks AMQP 0-9-1 and AMQP 1.0, MQTT and STOMP, and the Web MQTT plugin carries MQTT over a WebSocket connection for browser and IoT clients. That is why the same broker serves microservice messaging, background jobs, notification and real-time update fan-out, and IoT telemetry. A provider has to cover whichever of these your applications use, including the plugins.
Encryption in transit with TLS, authentication and access management for users and vhosts, and a record of who changed what are the baseline. Where the brokers sit decides the rest: at Stage 3 your messages stay in your own cloud account or data centre, which keeps data-residency and GDPR questions inside your boundary, and at Stage 4 you should ask where the cluster is hosted.
Self-managed RabbitMQ gives you full control and leaves every operating task with your team. A fully managed RabbitMQ service moves those tasks to a provider. Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ is a managed broker from a cloud provider: AWS performs maintenance and version upgrades in a scheduled maintenance window and publishes broker metrics to CloudWatch, and quorum queue nodes sit in different availability zones. It runs only in AWS. Because RabbitMQ uses standard protocols, clients usually need new endpoints and credentials rather than new code when a broker moves, which is what keeps lock-in low for any managed option. What differs between providers is who operates the broker and who answers when it fails.
Customer Success
See how enterprises trust AceMQ for their most critical RabbitMQ workloads.
Global Automotive Manufacturer
Replacing fragile SQL-trigger-based ingestion with a reliable event-driven architecture for plant-floor data movement and low-latency operations.
RabbitMQMQTT
KafkaSQL Server
KubernetesFortune 500 Financial Services Company
Improving RabbitMQ reliability, queue behavior, and operational guidance for a payment system processing over 200 production changes weekly.
RabbitMQ
AWS
Spring AMQPQuorum QueuesGlobal Aviation Technology Provider
Troubleshooting cluster failover, partition handling, and quorum queue issues in a high-stakes aviation operational environment.
RabbitMQKubernetesQuorum Queues
Prometheus
GrafanaState-Run Virtual Education Platform
Standardizing RabbitMQ deployment and training staff while migrating infrastructure from VMware to Nutanix.
RabbitMQNutanix
Red HatPrometheusGrafana
DockerInternational Payment Exchange Service
Reducing manual error-queue operations by improving retry handling, dead-lettering, and downstream flow management across RabbitMQ, BizTalk, and D365.
RabbitMQBizTalkD365
IBM MQFortune 500 Software Company
Migration to supported RabbitMQ versions with managed services, standardization, compliance posture, and Tanzu commercial licensing.
RabbitMQTanzu RabbitMQAWSEKSKubernetesGlobal Telecom Leader
Resolving weekly RabbitMQ crashes, optimizing for 300,000+ connected devices, and architecting horizontal scaling strategy.
RabbitMQKubernetesQuorum QueuesPrometheusGrafanaFortune 500 Industrial Conglomerate
Enterprise-grade RabbitMQ support with code-level remediation and patch management for regulated production environments.
RabbitMQFAQ
Support (Stages 1 and 2) is an SLA over a cluster your team runs: you hold the pager and call us when something breaks, and at Stage 2 we also watch the broker and flag trouble before you do. Managed services (Stages 3 and 4) means we run it: monitoring, patching, upgrades, capacity and on-call are ours, and the pager is ours. Teams with a capable platform team usually want support. Teams with no RabbitMQ specialist to spare usually want managed services. The assessment at the start makes clear which one fits.
Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ is RabbitMQ run by AWS as a managed broker, so applications talk to it over the same protocols. What differs is the surrounding service: AWS chooses the supported versions and plugins, it does not support RabbitMQ streams, and it runs only in AWS. If you need versions, plugins or streams outside that list, or the brokers in a different cloud, RabbitMQ in your own account is the alternative, and AceMQ can operate it there.
AWS supports the Amazon MQ service itself: availability, maintenance and the broker infrastructure. It does not diagnose how your applications use RabbitMQ, such as a consumer that stops acknowledging or a queue design that fills memory, and it does not cover RabbitMQ you run yourself on EC2 or EKS. AceMQ provides RabbitMQ support for both, with a 15-minute emergency response.
Not a first-party one. Microsoft's messaging services are Azure Service Bus and Event Hubs, which are not RabbitMQ. To keep RabbitMQ on Azure you either use a specialist host or run it in your own subscription on virtual machines or AKS. AceMQ supports it there at Stages 1 and 2 and operates it there at Stage 3.
Start with who should hold the pager. If your team can carry it and wants a specialist behind it, that is Stage 1, reactive support. If you also want AceMQ to spot trouble before your users do, that is Stage 2, proactive support with monitoring and alerts. If you want AceMQ to carry the pager, choose where the brokers live: in your own cloud account, Kubernetes cluster or data centre is Stage 3, and on AceMQ's platform is Stage 4. Compliance and data-residency rules usually decide between the two: if messages cannot leave your account, it is Stage 3. Most engagements start with an assessment, which makes the right stage clear.
It depends on the stage. At Stages 1 to 3 RabbitMQ runs on your infrastructure: your cloud account, your VPC, your data centre, your Kubernetes cluster. At Stage 3 AceMQ operates it there as a RabbitMQ managed service, so your messages never leave your security boundary and your data-residency position does not change. At Stage 4, AceMQ SaaS, we host and operate the cluster on our platform, from a shared sandbox up to dedicated multi-node clusters. That is the difference from CloudAMQP or Amazon MQ: you choose where the brokers live, and RabbitMQ specialists operate them either way.
It depends on the stage, and quote requests are answered within 1 hour. Stage 3 is priced on the size of the estate and the commitments you need, such as business-hours cover through to 24/7 with a 15-minute emergency response; you also keep paying your own cloud bill, because the infrastructure stays yours. Stage 4 is priced per cluster shape, with workload-readiness work added on top, and annual, multi-year and multi-cluster commitments discount from list. Stages 1 and 2 are priced by the cover you need. Tell us how many clusters you run and where, and the quote form is the quickest route to a real figure.
Yes, at Stage 4. AceMQ SaaS is hosted RabbitMQ operated by RabbitMQ specialists. Plans run from a shared, vhost-isolated Sandbox for development, through a dedicated single-node Starter, a dedicated three-node Growth cluster on quorum queues for production, and a Scale plan with instance classes tuned to your workload, to Enterprise with a custom topology. If the cluster has to sit in your own cloud account, we run it there instead, as Stage 3. Every plan carries the same 15-minute emergency response.
Both. Open-source RabbitMQ under the Mozilla Public License is fully supportable and a large share of the estates we run are open-source builds. You do not need to buy Tanzu RabbitMQ to have AceMQ operate your platform. Where a commercial licence genuinely helps we will say so and can source it; where it would change nothing for you, we say that too.
They stay covered. Community support ends when a release series reaches end of life. AceMQ's coverage reaches back to 3.8.x with security fixes backported to the build you actually run, which matters when a frozen change window, a certified application or an air-gapped estate makes upgrading this quarter impossible.
At Stage 3, yes, and the service is built so that you can. Runbooks, topology documentation and monitoring configuration are maintained as yours throughout, not as our internal knowledge, and a current handover pack exists at any point in the engagement. Exiting is a handover rather than a rebuild.
At Stage 3, everything needed to keep the brokers healthy without your team holding the pager: monitoring and alerting on queues, memory and disk alarms, connections and node health; high availability design with quorum queues replicated across RabbitMQ nodes; TLS encryption and authentication, including LDAP or OAuth 2.0 where you use them; plugin management for Shovel, Federation, MQTT and STOMP; backups of definitions; patching and upgrades in your change windows; capacity planning; and 24/7 incident response with a 15-minute emergency response. Stage 4 includes the cluster itself, the management console, definition backups and platform patching on top of that operating work.
Self-managed RabbitMQ means your team runs every part of it. Fully managed RabbitMQ moves monitoring, patching, upgrades, scaling and on-call to a provider, which is Stage 3 or Stage 4 here. Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ is a managed broker inside AWS, with AWS handling maintenance and version upgrades in a maintenance window. Because RabbitMQ uses standard protocols, clients usually need only new endpoints when the broker moves, so the practical question is who operates the broker and where it runs.
Both, and more. RabbitMQ's original protocol is AMQP 0-9-1 (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), RabbitMQ 4.0 made AMQP 1.0 a core protocol, and plugins add MQTT and STOMP; Java applications can also use JMS through RabbitMQ's JMS client. A managed service has to cover whichever protocols and plugins your applications depend on.
Yes. RabbitMQ is an actively developed open-source message broker, with RabbitMQ 4.3 as the current release line, and it remains a common choice for microservices, background jobs, asynchronous processing and enterprise integration, where flexible message routing and reliable message delivery matter more than replaying a log.
For a simple point-to-point queue inside one cloud, Amazon SQS, Azure Service Bus or Google Pub/Sub may be enough. RabbitMQ is the better fit when you need exchange-based routing and messaging patterns such as topic and fan-out, standard protocols, or the same messaging layer across clouds and data centres. Moving off it is a rewrite of every producer and consumer, so most teams keep RabbitMQ and change who runs it.
It depends on who holds the pager. At Stages 1 and 2 your team holds it, and an AceMQ engineer picks up the ticket under the contracted SLA, with a 15-minute emergency response on follow-the-sun cover, 24/7. At Stages 3 and 4 the alert reaches AceMQ's on-call rota first, and your team is kept informed rather than woken. At every stage it is a named senior engineer who already knows your topology, with no tier-1 triage layer to get past: the first person who reads the ticket is the person who can fix it. Where a problem needs the people who build RabbitMQ, AceMQ escalates directly to the RabbitMQ core team, access no other services partner has.
Let's talk
Tell us how many clusters you run, where they live and who holds the pager today. We will recommend a stage and reply to your quote request within 1 hour.
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