Overview

Woodmen Life Insurance chose to migrate from self-managed RabbitMQ to Azure Service Bus as part of a strategic initiative to reduce operational tech debt and move toward managed Azure services. With 66 applications connected to RabbitMQ, the migration required a co-ownership model with AceMQ to plan and execute at scale.

Challenge

Migrating 66 applications from RabbitMQ to Azure Service Bus required careful dependency mapping, migration sequencing, and a robust observability solution to monitor the transition. The self-managed RabbitMQ operational burden was the key driver, and the migration needed to eliminate that burden without introducing new risks during the transition.

Environment

Azure cloud; RabbitMQ self-managed cluster; 66 connected applications; Azure Managed Grafana for monitoring; insurance company with operational compliance requirements.

Approach

AceMQ led the migration architecture design, mapping RabbitMQ exchange and queue topologies to Azure Service Bus topics and subscriptions. The co-ownership migration model assigned clear ownership of application migrations to development teams while AceMQ managed the messaging infrastructure transition. Azure Managed Grafana was configured for unified monitoring.

Solution

• Migration architecture mapping 66 applications from RabbitMQ to Azure Service Bus
• Co-ownership migration model with clear team assignments
• RabbitMQ to Azure Service Bus topology translation (exchanges → topics, queues → subscriptions)
• Azure Managed Grafana observability setup for migration monitoring
• Application migration sequencing based on dependency analysis

Outcome

Technologies