Multi-Platform Deployment With RabbitMQ Message bus

In ZeroMQ based VOLTTRON, if multiple instances needed to be connected together and be able to send or receive messages to/from remote instances we would do it in few different ways.

1. Write an agent that would connect to remote instance directly and publish/subscribe to messages or perform RPC communication directly. This is described in Agent connection to remote volttron instance
2. Use special agents such as forwarder/data puller agents to forward/receive messages to/from remote instances. This can be achieved using RabbitMQ’s shovel plugin and is described at Using Shovel Plug-in
3. Configure vip address of all remote instances that an instance has to connect to in it’s $VOLTTRON_HOME/external_discovery.json and let the router module in each instance manage the connection and take care of the message routing for us. This is the most seamless way to do multi-platform communication. This can be achieved using RabbitMQ’s federation plugin. Setup for this is described at Using Federation Plug-in