AWS SQS: CASE STUDY
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message-oriented middleware and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. Three ways to get started with SQS are AWS console, Command Line Interface, or SDK. Amazon SQS provides queues for high-throughput, system-to-system messaging. You can use queues to decouple heavyweight processes and to buffer and batch work. Amazon SQS stores messages until microservices and serverless applications process them.
Types Of Simple Queue Service
- Standard Queue
It gives unlimited throughput, every message is delivered at least once but occasionally more than one copy of the message is delivered. For this, we can reduce it by increasing the Visibility timeout. In the case of the standard, the message delivery order is not fixed.
- FIFO [ First In First Out] Queue.
SQS FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent to SQS. FIFO queues are designed to enhance messaging between applications when the order of operations and events is critical, or where duplicates can’t be tolerated
Functionality
- Unlimited queues and messages: Create unlimited Amazon SQS queues with an unlimited number of message in any region
- Payload Size: maximum payload size should be between 1KB to 256KB
- Retain messages in queues for up to 14 days.
- Send and read messages simultaneously.
- Visibility timeout: When a message is received, it becomes “locked” while being processed. This keeps other computers from processing the message simultaneously. If the message processing fails, the lock will expire and the message will be available again.
- Server-side encryption (SSE): Protect the contents of messages in Amazon SQS queues using keys managed in the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). SSE encrypts messages as soon as Amazon SQS receives them. The messages are stored in encrypted form and Amazon SQS decrypts messages only when they are sent to an authorized consumer.
- Dead Letter Queues (DLQ): Handle messages that have not been successfully processed by a consumer with Dead Letter Queues. When the maximum receive count is exceeded for a message it will be moved to the DLQ associated with the original queue. Set up separate consumer processes for DLQs which can help analyze and understand why messages are getting stuck. DLQs must be of the same type as the source queue (standard or FIFO).
CASE STUDY:
- redBus
redBus is expanding its AWS solution to include Amazon SQS and SNS for monitoring, alerts, and intercommunication. “Amazon SQS is an especially good solution for enabling messaging between external applications and our applications.”
- Oyster.com
Oyster.com uses Amazon Web Services to store and process images for its website. The team uses Amazon EC2 and Amazon SQS in an integrated workflow to generate the sizes they need for each photo. SQS communicates the photos that need to be processed and the status of the jobs.
- Change Healthcare
Change Healthcare uses AWS services like Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SQS, and Amazon SNS to handle millions of confidential transactions daily from its clients while maintaining full compliance with healthcare industry regulations, including HIPAA.
- BMW
The BMW Group is using AWS for its connected car application that collects sensor data from BMW 7 Series cars to give drivers dynamically updated map information. BMW built its new car-as-a-sensor (CARASSO) service in only six months leveraging Amazon SQS, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
