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Amazon Web Services – Introduction to Simple Queue Service(SQS)

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SQS enables web service applications that help to quickly and reliably queue messages. These messages have one component in their application that generates only when to be consumed by another component. Therefore, the queue is a temporary repository for messages and these messages are awaiting processing. So, Once these messages are processed, the messages also get deleted from the queue. AWS SQS service basically adds messages in a queue and then, Users will pick up these messages from the queue. A queue is a place where you can store your messages until they are extracted from the queue or expired.

What is Full Form Of Amazon SQS?

The full form of “Amazon SQS is Simple Queue Service”. It is fully managed by AWS it’s self it will take care of all the aspects like hardware provisioning, maintenance, and scaling. AWS SQS provides communication in a distributed system or application. The applications which are running in the cloud will be distributed across the different servers they need to communicate with each other.

How does AWS SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service) work?

SQS standards for Simple Queue Service offer asynchronous massaged-based communication between two services. Before SQS the communication between the two services was based upon the API calls after the SQS the event producer will notify the consumer in an asynchronous manner.

AWS-SQS

The messages that are in the queue are in the form of Jason format and the queue is a holding pool of messages the limit of each message is 256 kilobytes per message. The publishers will publish the messages into the queue and the messages are processed or removed with the help of consumers.

What is SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service) In AWS?

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) will let you send messages, store the messages, and receive messages between various software components at any amount, without losing of actual messages.  Also, without requiring some other services to be available. so, basically, Amazon SQS is a distributed queue system.

Queues are used to store textual information so it can be received and used by a consumer later on. The consumer is something that is getting a message from a queue. It can be anything that is able to make an API call to SQS (application, microservice, human, etc….). Using this paradigm we implement decoupling. 

The decoupling allows the processing of incoming requests later on. So when the consumer is overloaded, it waits before getting another message. This way our applications become more fault-tolerant. Amazon Simple Queue Service(SQS) is a fully managed queue service in the AWS cloud. 

Creating, Accessing, and Managing SQS Queues (Amazon Simple Queue Service)

Follow the below steps to create a SQS using the AWS console:

Step 1: Open AWS console and type “SQS” in the search bar. And select it.To know how to create AWS account refer to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Free Tier Account Set up.

Amazon Console

Step 2: Then hit “Create queue”.  You should see the following screen:

Create Queue

Every field has an Info clause. You can click on it and read about it if curious.

Step 3: Name the queue ‘geeky_queue’ name and hit “Create Queue”. For other fields defaults are fine.

Queue is Created

AWS SQS VS SNS

AWS SQS

AWS SNS

SQS is an message queuing service.

SNS is an publish/subscribe service.

It will transmit the data between distributed components.

It will distribute messages to multiple subscribers with the help of email,HTTP, AWS Lambda.

Used when you need to decouple the components.

Used to broadcast the data to all the subscribers.

Use Cases Of AWS SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service)

  1. Batch Processing: SQS is typically used to manage workloads that require data processing. The queue can be used for scenarios like data transfer, image processing, and report production since producers can add tasks to it, and consumers can retrieve and process them concurrently.
  2. Decoupled Microservices: In micro-services architectures, services need to communicate with each other asynchronously. SQS allows services to send messages to each other without needing to know the details of the recipient, enabling loose coupling between services.
  3. Order Processing: For e-commerce platforms, SQS can be used to manage order processing. When an order is placed, it can be added to a queue, and multiple workers can process orders in parallel, ensuring timely order fulfillment.
  4. Notifications: SQS can be used to send notifications or alerts to various parts of an application. For example, an event occurring in one component can publish a message to an SQS queue, which can then be processed by other components for notifications, logging, or real-time updates.

AWS SQS Queue Types

There are only two types of queues in SQS:

  1. First-in-first-out(FIFO): First-in-first-out(FIFO) queue the order of messages is preserved. So if you receive a message from the queue you will get the oldest message. This queue also guarantees that the message will be delivered only once. 
  2. Standart queue: Standart queue this queue messages are delivered randomly. Also, a message can be delivered multiple times. So you shouldn’t rely on order and only one-time delivery in this type of queues.

Features of AWS SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service)

  1. SQS is not push-based, it is basically on pull-based.
  2. The size of messages in SQS are 256 KB.
  3. There is default retention period in SQS. The default retention period is of 4 days.
  4. Messages in SQS of a queue is kept from 1 minute to 14 days.
  5. SQS also guarantees that the messages will only be processed at least once.

AWS SQS Pricing

AWS SQS follows two pricing models

  • Standard: You will be charged for the number of messages that you have sent or receive regardless size of the message. And also it is default pricing of the SQS
  • Brust: This Pricing model is specially designed for the applications which have brusty traffic patterns. You will be charged on monthly bases.

Simple Queue Service(SQS) – FAQs

AWS SQS Visibility Timeout

There will be queue of messages or tasks which needs to be performed and if the consumer retrieves the message from the queue then it will not visible to the other consumers with in the stetted timer. It will helps us to reduce the duplicting the messeges by which we can ensure that a message is processed by only one consumer at a time.

What Is The Advantage Of AWS SQS?

Amazon SQS provides a locking mechanism for messages during processing, which allows multiple producers to send messages and multiple consumers to receive messages concurrently.

What Is Simple Queue Service?

A simple queue is a data structure that follows the first-in-first-out (FIFO) principle. This means that the first element added to the queue is the first element to be removed. Simple queues are often used to implement buffers and message queues.



Last Updated : 23 Jan, 2024
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