OASIS adopts AMQPv1: An open standard for smart grid and cloud

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For governments looking for cutting edge, open source messaging solutions, the recent action by the OASIS standards consortium to approve the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) Version 1.0 is a major development.

The need for cutting edge, mission critical messaging options is arising in a variety of contexts: it is a key component to interoperable 'smart grid' frameworks, as well as 'cloud' solutions.

The AMQP specification is available on a royalty-free basis, and grants access to necessary technologies contained within the AMQP Specification download, removing the need for any separate step to apply for a license. This approach is specifically meant to encourage open source implementations of AMQP, in addition to proprietary implementations. As such, it is quite consistent with initiatives by governments to utilize 'open standards.'

Already, AMQP is being used by US Government agencies to achieve their goals. The CTO of the US Customs & Border Patrol, Wolf Tomb, just last month described how his agency is using AMQP as a critical mission implementation to migrate their key customers from legacy messaging system onto a high performance, open standard-based information sharing platform. His presentation can be found at: http://www.slideshare.net/FedScoop/wolf-tombe-preso. (The AMQP specific slides start at slide 7.)

Also, the US Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) (an agency within the US Department of Transporation) has incorporated AMQP as an essential transport protocol as part of its Positive Train Control (PTC)/Interoperable Train Control Communication System (ITCC) initiative, named as one of the "most wanted" initiatives for national transportation safety.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the System Wide Information Management (SWIM), which seeks to have all European air traffic partners operate and have contemporaneously the same integrated Air Traffic Management information, has also incorporated AMQP in its information infrastructure framework.

And in the area of big data, cloud, and management of literally 'oceans of data', AMQP has enabled the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and its accompanying Cyberinfrastructure Program. The OOI is a large, US National Science Foundation project intended to build a platform for ocean sciences with an operational life span of 30 years.

With the formal adoption of AMQP v1 by OASIS, I suspect we’ll see additional examples emerge in the coming year utilizing this open source technology reflected in this new open standard.

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Mark Bohannon
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Mark Bohannon | Mark Bohannon is Vice President of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs at Red Hat. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President, Public Policy and General Counsel at the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal U.S. trade association for the software and digital content industry.
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Angelo Corsaro | November 16, 2012
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Hello Mark,

I'd be curious to learn more about ATM adoption since to the best of my knowledge the EUROCAE ED-133 standard recommends the OMG Data Distribution Service (OMG DDS http://portals.omg.org/dds/) as the standard for SWIM operational interoperability.

In addition I'd argue that the OMG DDS -- a freely accessible Open Standard with very high quality Open Source implementations such as OpenSplice DDS (http://www.opensplice.org). -- is actually the standard of reference for mission and business critical applications. AMQP really is really designed around the enterprise messaging use case. As such, it is not a very good fit for highly available, high volumes mission-/business- critical applications. For instance it only supports TCP/IP as a transport and this limits the scalability on networks that support multicast, it has a brokered-only mode which inevitable increases latencies and introduces single point of failures, and last but not the list it has no support for self-healing / automatic-reconfiguration.

For your reference DDS is currently used in some of the most challenging mission and business critical applications such as Smart Grids (e.g. the Grand Coulee Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam is using DDS!), Smart Cities, In Memory Big-Data Analytics, Transportation (several Air Traffic Control and Management Systems) and Aero-Spatial applications such as the Very Large Telescope (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope)

Cheers,
Angelo

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