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
Woodmen Life Insurance reduced RabbitMQ operational overhead through a structured migration to Azure Service Bus, with 66 applications migrated under a co-ownership model and ongoing Azure Managed Grafana observability.
Technologies
Azure Service Bus
RabbitMQ
Kafka
Docker
Kubernetes
