Why OpenMessaging Could Redefine Cloud‑Native Messaging Standards

On October 14, at Alibaba's 2017 Hangzhou Cloud Yunqi Conference, Dan Kohn, Executive Vice President of the CNCF, and Alibaba researcher Jiang Jiangwei announced that the OpenMessaging open‑source project, an international standard for distributed messaging, has officially joined the Linux Foundation, marking the first globally initiated standard in the distributed computing field from China.

Value of OpenMessaging

In the cloud‑computing era, messaging is a critical link in data‑driven architectures, connecting data sources, processing engines, and applications. Two major problems persist globally: the lack of a vendor‑neutral industry standard, leading to complex and incompatible middleware, and existing solutions that do not fit cloud‑native architectures, limiting support for big data, stream processing, and IoT.

OpenMessaging discards legacy baggage, offering a lightweight, cross‑platform, cross‑language, cross‑product, and cross‑cloud standard with cloud‑native capabilities, enabling seamless multi‑cloud migration and one‑stop solutions for finance, e‑commerce, IoT, and big data.

Detailed Overview and Future Plans

Alibaba, with nearly a decade of experience in distributed messaging, powers over 3,000 internal applications with its RocketMQ middleware, handling trillions of messages during events like Double Eleven. The open‑source version of RocketMQ is now an Apache top‑level project, widely adopted across internet, finance, and big‑data sectors.

Leveraging this expertise, OpenMessaging abstracts messaging requirements into a standard model that connects big‑data and stream‑processing platforms, aiming first for standardized open‑source messaging integration, then coverage of major cloud platforms, and finally ecosystem expansion.

OpenMessaging has already been implemented in Apache RocketMQ 4.1.0 (supporting OpenMessaging 0.1.0‑alpha) and is being rolled out across Alibaba Cloud, allowing users to adopt the standard via RocketMQ's documentation.

In the next year, the project will advance along three dimensions:

Open‑source community: Release OpenMessaging 1.0, with Apache RocketMQ, Apache Pulsar, and other open‑source products adopting the standard, and explore integration with Spring Cloud, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka, etc.

Cloud platforms: Implement the standard in Alibaba Cloud's commercial messaging product Aliware MQ and assess adoption by other cloud providers.

Ecosystem: Extend through three components—Connector (linking to major big‑data and stream‑processing platforms), Replicator (connecting to databases such as MySQL, Redis, HBase), and Appender (covering logging and metrics).

The project has formed a small OpenMessaging Technical Steering Committee (OMTSC) and an OpenMessaging Industrial Advisory Board (OMIAB). Initial TSC members come from Alibaba, Didi, Yahoo, and Streamlio, while the IAB consists of industry experts who will guide and promote the standard.

When mainstream open‑source projects and cloud providers support OpenMessaging, users will be able to migrate across products and clouds at low or no cost, without vendor lock‑in or language constraints. Jiang Jiangwei emphasized that OpenMessaging aims to become a global, vendor‑agnostic, cloud‑native standard serving multiple industries.