Drupal can be used to develop and launch many independent sites within an organisation (made easier with distributions and install profiles). At the same time long running processes also provide a challenge to scaling when wanting to run a large cluster of sites.

One way to scale things like long running processes or inter-site communications is to use a message broker / queue system. RabbitMQ is such a system and it works great with Drupal.

I will show you the concepts behind RabbitMQ and how to get going quickly with some useful PHP/Drupal tools (message_broker module, and the PHP AMQP library).

Topics covered:

- message queue basics
- AMQP
- how we have used it for content syncing to an arbitrary number of Drupal sites
- how we used it to provide asynchronous management of long running processes
- how to use it to have rock solid, robust and scalable messaging in your cluster of sites