Hi,
Yes, rebalancing triggers leader election but doesn't change cluster membership (each quorum queue is effectively a cluster on top of a RabbitMQ cluster).
There are additional commands that change membership:
rabbitmq-queues grow
rabbitmq-queues shrink
rabbitmq-queues add_member
rabbitmq-queues delete_member
Having said that, I'd question the inevitability of RabbitMQ cluster scale-out. A vast majority of RabbitMQ clusters starts at 3 nodes and never goes beyond that.
There are larger clusters (generally 5 or 7 nodes, rarely more) but even then, I'm fairly sure most users stay with the cluster they have and perhaps add more CPUs/RAM
when necessary. I'd be very interested to hear if your experience is different. This is not to say there are no good reasons to add nodes to a cluster. For such
situations, there are the commands I mentioned above.
Best,