AWS SQS Use cases

What is SQS?

AWS SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service) is a service which helps to align the message. Moreover, it also helps to enable the user to separate and scale microservices, distributed system, and serverless applications. Amazon SQS makes it easy to manage the operating message-oriented middleware and enhances the developers to focus on their work. Amazon Simple Queue Service works at any volume without losing the message or requiring other services to be available. It helps to send, store, and receive messages between software components. AWS SQS can start with the help of the tools such as Amazon Console, command line interface, and SDK.

Benefits of Amazon Simple Queue Service

Amazon SQS is a message queue service used by distributed applications to exchange messages through a polling model, and can be used to decouple sending and receiving components.

Use Amazon SQS to transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. SQS lets you decouple application components so that they run and fail independently, increasing the overall fault tolerance of the system.

Use Case of Amazon SQS in NASA

The NASA Image and Video Library provides easy access to more than 140,000 still images, audio recordings, and videos — documenting NASA’s more than half a century of achievements in exploring the vast unknown. The architecture includes Amazon SQS to decouple incoming jobs from pipeline processes and Amazon Simple Notification Service to trigger the processing pipeline when new content is updated.

“We now have an agile, scalable foundation on which to do all kinds of amazing things. Much like with the exploration of space, we’re just starting to imagine all that we can do with it.”

-Bryan Walls (Imagery Experts Deputy Program Manager, NASA)

SQS offers two types of message queues. Standard queues offer maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery. SQS FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent.

• It Eliminates administrative overhead

AWS manages all ongoing operations and underlying infrastructure needed to provide a highly available and scalable message queuing service. With SQS, there is no upfront cost, no need to acquire, install, and configure messaging software, and no time-consuming build-out and maintenance of supporting infrastructure. SQS queues are dynamically created and scale automatically so you can build and grow applications quickly and efficiently.

• Reliably deliver messages

Use Amazon SQS to transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. SQS lets you decouple application components so that they run and fail independently, increasing the overall fault tolerance of the system. Multiple copies of every message are stored redundantly across multiple availability zones so that they are available whenever needed.

• Keep sensitive data secure

You can use Amazon SQS to exchange sensitive data between applications using server-side encryption (SSE) to encrypt each message body. Amazon SQS SSE integration with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) allows you to centrally manage the keys that protect SQS messages along with keys that protect your other AWS resources. AWS KMS logs every use of your encryption keys to AWS CloudTrail to help meet your regulatory and compliance needs.

• Scale elastically and cost-effectively

Amazon SQS leverages the AWS cloud to dynamically scale based on demand. SQS scales elastically with your application so you don’t have to worry about capacity planning and pre-provisioning. There is no limit to the number of messages per queue, and standard queues provide nearly unlimited throughput. Costs are based on usage which provides significant cost saving versus the “always-on” model of self-managed messaging middleware.