Dissecting SQS FIFO Queues — Does Ordered and Exactly Once Messaging Really Exist?

At first glance, Amazon’s First-In-First-Out (FIFO) message queues provide an excellent feature set for business-critical scenarios. With FIFO, the order in which messages are sent and received is strictly preserved. With exactly-once processing, message duplicates are not introduced into the queue, and consumers control when a message is made available for redelivery. Reading past the marketing hype, how well do FIFO queues work in the real world? This article takes a deep dive into SQS FIFO queues to test the claims of message ordering and exactly-once processing, paying particular care to the conditions under which these claims hold....

August 1, 2017 · 12 min · Kevin Sookocheff

Publish-Subscribe Messaging Using Amazon SQS

Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS) provides durable messaging guarantees and is an excellent backbone for messaging services. However, SQS does not support “fan-out” of messages so that multiple consuming services can each receive a copy of a message. This means that true publish-subscribe messaging requires some additional work. This post describes some architectural choices that provide durable publish-subscribe messaging using SQS by tracking messaging subscribers using a database, and matching published messages to interested subscribers....

March 24, 2017 · 5 min · Kevin Sookocheff

SQS or Kinesis? Comparing Apples to Oranges

When designing Workiva’s durable messaging system we took a hard look at using Amazon’s Kinesis as the message storage and delivery mechanism. At first glance, Kinesis has a feature set that looks like it can solve any problem: it can store terabytes of data, it can replay old messages, and it can support multiple message consumers. But if you dig a little deeper you will find that Kinesis is well suited for a very particular use case, and if your application doesn’t fit this use case, Kinesis may be a lot more trouble than it’s worth....

March 21, 2017 · 7 min · Kevin Sookocheff

0 to Message in 60 Seconds: Getting Started with Amazon SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a message queue service that allows applications to reliably queue messages from one system component to be consumed by another component. Adding a queue between application components allows them to run independently, effectively decoupling applications by providing a buffer between producers of data and their consumers. Up and Running This section provides a guide to getting up and running with SQS using a fictional music store as an example....

October 5, 2016 · 4 min · Kevin Sookocheff