What is AWS SQS (Simple Queue Service)?

Hello Readers, I want to share what I learnt about AWS SQS.

As per AWS documentation, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and server-less applications.

SQS includes key features which helps in building serverless applications and Microservice Architectures. Lets us have a look on few of those.

• These are Pull based system
• Decouples the components of an application
• Acts as a buffer between Producer and Consumer applications
• Supports Unlimited Transactions per Second
• Supports FIFO queues which are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent
• Default Retention period of SQS is 4 days, but can be customized from 1 min to 14 days
• Default message size which SQS supports is 256 KB and it supports maximum message size upto 2 GB using Amazon SQS Extended Client Library for Java

Benefits of AWS SQS:

• Provide a highly available and scalable message queuing service
• Transmits any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available
• Exchange of sensitive data between applications using server-side encryption (SSE) integrated with KMS
• SQS scales elastically with your application so you don’t have to worry about capacity planning and pre-provisioning

What is Visibility Timeout in SQS?

Visibility timeout is time for which message is invisible in SQS post it is picked from the application.

Default visibility timeout value for an SQS is 30 seconds. This can be increased based on the message processing time and can be set to a maximum value of 12 hours.

References:

https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/