Rackspace Cloud Queues API 1.0

Last updated: Dec 03, 2024

The Rackspace Cloud Queues service is an open source, scalable, and highly available message and notifications service based on the OpenStack Marconi project. It supports a variety of messaging patterns and enables customers to create and manage a producer-consumer or a publish-subscriber model (Messaging patterns) from one simple API. Unlimited queues and messages give Cloud Queues users the flexibility they need to create powerful web applications in the cloud.

This guide is intended to assist software developers who want to develop applications by using the REST application programming interface (API) for the Cloud Queues service.

To use the information provided here, you should have a general understanding of the service and have access to an installation of it. You should also be familiar with the following technologies:

• RESTful web services

• HTTP/1.1

• JSON or XML serialization formats

Use the following links to jump directly to user and reference information for the Cloud Queues service REST API:

• Getting started

• General API information

• API reference

• Release notes

Note

You can also use Cloud Queues from the Cloud Control Panel.

Rackspace Cloud Queues consists of a few basic components: queues, messages, claims, and statistics.

In the producer-consumer model, users create queues in which producers, or servers, can post messages. Workers, or consumers, can then claim those messages and delete them after they complete the actions associated with the messages. A single claim can contain multiple messages, and administrators can query claims for status.

In the publisher-subscriber model, messages are posted to a queue as in the producer-consumer model, but messages are never claimed. Instead, subscribers, or watchers, send GET requests to pull all messages that have been posted since their last request. In this model, a message remains in the queue, unclaimed, until the message’s time to live (TTL) has expired.

In both of these models, administrators can get queue statistics that display the most recent and oldest messages, the number of unclaimed messages, and more.