Email Microservice

[CamiKaze]

Trying to find a good article on whether this is a good idea or not.
What do you guys think?

I'm thinking of having RabbitMQ or MQTT infront of a Microservice that deals with emailing people.

 

[dadecoza]

I have email, sms, and skype for business microservices as consumers on RabbitMQ works great.

 

[CamiKaze]

I have email, sms, and skype for business microservices as consumers on RabbitMQ works great.

Link to a tutorial or Github repo available?

 

[dadecoza]

It is on our companies internal repo, however it is nothing special. Python scripts using the pika libraries to connect to RabbitMQ. The scripts are running on Docker containers deployed in OpenShift.

Mostly copy and paste from https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-one-python.html .

 

[CamiKaze]

Thanks man.
Anything you came across that was a roadblock?

 

[dadecoza]

Thanks man.
Anything you came across that was a roadblock?

It works pretty well and stable, but if for some reason the micorservice/consumer do fall over and it is down for some time and you restart it, it will just continue to process the messages on the queue. In most cases this is a good thing but if you are sending out time sensitive notifications like OTPs or 2FA requests then you might end up flooding users with expired messages. In some cases you would clear the queues before restarting the consumer.

(ideally you should have multiple consumers on the same queue to avoid the above situation)

 

[CamiKaze]

Yo, @dadecoza ,

I am going to try another approach through Azure, using SendGrid.

Setting it up is a byatch though.

 

[Nether]

Got a Camel Apache fuse route looking at a Kafka message queue that routes to an internal smtp server. All on openshift, works great

 

[dadecoza]

Yo, @dadecoza ,

I am going to try another approach through Azure, using SendGrid.

Setting it up is a byatch though.

If you want to go cloud then you can also look at AWS SNS. It combines queues with notification services like email.

 

[alternate]

If you want to go cloud then you can also look at AWS SNS. It combines queues with notification services like email.

+1 for SNS

 

[Hamster]

Yo, @dadecoza ,

I am going to try another approach through Azure, using SendGrid.

Setting it up is a byatch though.

SendGrid's API goes down no and again (or becomes unreachable) and also VERY finicky wrt characters like é for example.

So:

• You'll want to sanitise the data being sent especially people's names
• You'll want to check those response statuses and persist the failed messages to a database.
• The 4xx errors are done for and you'll want visibility on them to either be manually fixed or at least make sure future messages don't suffer the same error.
• The 5xx errors you'll wan to try resend based on a timeframe that makes sense (does it make sense to retry for a couple of hours, days or never?)

If your going microservices and want a bus/broker in between then I'd use Nats.io for simplicity's sake. I wouldn't bother with Kafka, RabbitMQ or anything else really (unless your using cloud infrastructure like AWS SNS etc, obviously)