We put together an add-on for py-amqplib that implements AMQP client with non-blocking sockets in python.

There are at least 2 scenarios where non-blocking sockets help, and both are applicable to consumers: 1) when you want to be able to interrupt consumer’s event loop without waiting for a next incoming message; 2) when you want to consume messages from multiple brokers (or over multiple connections) in a single event loop.

Special thanks to Barry Pederson who created py-amqplib library and made it available to the public.

Please see my announcement on rabbitmq-discuss mailing list. If your architecture still relies on custom or proprietary messaging protocols, I strongly suggest that you take a look at AMQP and especially RabbitMQ.

UPDATED: You can download the add-on directly from http://lists.rabbitmq.com/pipermail/rabbitmq-discuss/attachments/20080302/455b87df/attachment.txt

UPDATED x2: If you came to this post today (2009 and beyond), please note that this add-on has been out of date for some time. Non-blocking AMQP with python can be done today with txamqp if you are using twisted, or with pika.

With database writes way less frequent than reads and availability of excellent caching (memcached, for example), this is quite doable.

UPDATED 3/27/2008: This post is no longer entirely accurate. Please see http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/03/new-ec2-feature.html for more details on availability of static IP addresses in EC2.

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This week on Elastic Server blog we announced the official name of the technology that I described in my article for Linux Journal. It’s now called VcubeV (the Vs are silent).

I love it. Did you notice association with P2P, especially if you take “P” to stand for “physical” instead of “peer”? “V” in our case is “virtual” (as in virtual machines) and cube is a next power after 2, which at least in my mind indicates VcubeV’s ability to work through firewalls and NAT (vs. 2 which assumes direct network connectivity).

Anyway, kudos to my colleagues at CohesiveFT for coming up with such a great name!