Message Ordering

AMPS guarantees that, for each AMPS instance, each subscription to a topic receives messages in the order in which AMPS received the messages (with the exception of messages that have been returned to a message queue for redelivery or the results of a query). Before a given message is delivered to a subscriber, all previous messages for that topic are delivered to the subscriber. AMPS does this by enforcing a total order across the instance for all messages received from publishers, including messages received via replication. When AMPS is using a transaction log, that order is preserved in the transaction log for the instance, and persists across instance restarts. When replaying from the transaction log, a subscriber will always receive messages in the same order in which messages were originally delivered by that instance of AMPS.

This guarantee also applies across topics for subscriptions that involve multiple topics, for all topics except views, queues, and conflated topics. Views and queues guarantee that every message on the view or the queue appears in the order in which the message was published. However, the computation involved in producing messages for views and queues may introduce some amount of processing latency, and AMPS does not delay messages on other topics while performing these computations. For a queue that provides at-least-once delivery, if a processor fails and returns a message to the queue, that message will be redelivered (which means that the new processor may receive the message out of order). Likewise, when AMPS is providing conflation (either through a conflated topic or the conflation options on a subscription), AMPS does not provide ordering guarantees for conflated messages.

Applications often use this guarantee to publish checkpoint messages, indicating some external state of the system, to a checkpoint topic. For example, you might publish messages marking the beginning of a business day to a checkpoint topic, MARKERS, while the ORDERS topic records the orders during that day. Subscribers to the regular expression ^(ORDERS|MARKERS)$ are guaranteed to receive the message that marks the business day before any of the messages published to the ORDERS topic for that day, since AMPS preserves the original order of the messages.

For messages constructed by AMPS, such as the output of a view, AMPS processes messages for each topic in the order in which they arrive (unless conflation is requested) and delivers each calculated message to subscribers as soon as the calculation is finished and a message is produced. This keeps the latency low for each individual topic. However, this means that while AMPS guarantees the order in which messages are produced within each view, messages produced for views that do simple operations will generally take less time to be produced than messages for views that perform complex calculations or require more complicated serialization. This means that AMPS guarantees ordering within view topics, but does not guarantee that messages for separate view topics arrive in a particular order.

The figure below shows a possible ordering for messages received on an underlying topic and two views that use the topic:

View Message Ordering

Notice that within each topic, AMPS enforces an absolute order. However, the Simple View produces the results of Message 3 before the Complex View produces the results of Message 2. AMPS delivers the message for each topic as soon as possible.

Replicated Message Ordering

When providing messages received via replication (see Replicating Messages Between Instances), the principles on message ordering provided above still apply. AMPS records messages into the local transaction log in the order in which messages are received by the instance and provides messages to subscribers in that order. AMPS uses the sequence of publishes assigned by the original publisher and the order assigned by the upstream instance to ensure that all replicated messages are received and recorded in order with no gaps or duplicates.

Each instance of AMPS replicates messages to downstream destinations in the order in which messages are recorded in the transaction log.

AMPS does not enforce a global total ordering across a replication topology. This peer-to-peer approach means that an AMPS instance can continue accepting messages from publishers and providing messages to subscribers even when the remote side of a replication link is offline or if replication is delayed due to network congestion. However, if two messages are published to different instances at the same time by different publishers, the two instances may record a different overall message order for those messages, even though message order from each publisher is preserved.