What is Cue?

Cue is a message broker provisioning service for Openstack. Its goal is to simplify and automate the complex tasks of provisioning, management, and administration of message brokers. Cue is designed to provide API, CLI, and UI based management of open source brokers such as RabbitMQ and Kafka. Because it’s designed to be pluggable, proprietary message brokers can also be delivered as a service through Cue. The service will provide resource isolation at the VM level, and does not attempt to implement multi-tenancy at the message broker layer.

There are two personas to keep in mind when thinking about Cue. One is the Cloud Operator. The Cloud Operator installs and operates Cue, alongside the rest of OpenStack. This person cares about Cue installation and upgrades, along with broker level availability and versioning capabilities. The second persona is the application developer. This person provisions message broker clusters from the Cue API, CLI, or Horizon console. Alternatively, the application developer consumes Cue through a Platform as a Service product such as Cloud Foundry. In this scenario there is already a Cue provisioned cluster and the developer simply specifies that a queue of a certain name is needed in the application’s manifest file. At deploy time, the queue is created directly on the message broker itself using a Cloud Foundry service broker.