AMQP clients will allow you to declare your exchanges, queues, and bindings at the consumer level but that can cause problems as you use it more. You may get to the point that you will have to grep for all the declare methods in your code or run into problems trying to migrate to a new broker.

An alternative is to have consumers and producers take only the name of a queue or exchange and handle the rest outside of the application. This allows you to see and change in one place the configuration for all of your applications. When you need to provision a new broker it is done in a few seconds instead having to migrate some consumers, then all producers, then the rest of the consumers.

I've started writing and using Declare AMQP so that I can provision everything within Chef. It only supports the features I'm using but is very simple.

The migration is now much simpler as provisioning the server once is enough to make it ready for all applications. When I need to change exchanges or bindings I don't have to update any code. There is still the need to know which applications publish which routing key, but not a huge concern.

This has helped out as well configuring queues with specific priorities for the same type of tasks. Each application can be started with a queue to listen to and the configuration for both the broker and applications remains in one place.