RabbitMQ is a message broker that was created in 2007. It facilitates communication between message producers and consumers. Producers publish messages to exchanges, which then route the messages to queues based on bindings. Consumers receive messages from queues. There are different types of exchanges, including direct exchanges which route based on message keys, fanout exchanges which broadcast messages to all queues, and topic exchanges which route based on pattern matching of message routing keys. The document provides code examples for producing and consuming messages using RabbitMQ in Java.