What is Amazon Simple Queue Service?
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a secure, durable, and available hosted queue that lets you integrate and decouple distributed software systems and components. Amazon SQS offers common constructs such as dead-letter queues and cost allocation tags. It provides a generic web services API that you can access using any programming language that the AWS SDK supports.
Benefits of using Amazon SQS:
Security – You control who can send messages to and receive messages from an Amazon SQS queue. You can choose to transmit sensitive data by protecting the contents of messages in queues by using default Amazon SQS managed server-side encryption (SSE), or by using custom SSE keys managed in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).
Durability – For the safety of your messages, Amazon SQS stores them on multiple servers. Standard queues support at-least-once message delivery, and FIFO queues support exactly-once message processing and high-throughput mode.
Availability – Amazon SQS uses redundant infrastructure to provide highly-concurrent access to messages and high availability for producing and consuming messages.
Scalability – Amazon SQS can process each buffered request independently, scaling transparently to handle any load increases or spikes without any provisioning instructions.
Reliability – Amazon SQS locks your messages during processing, so that multiple producers can send and multiple consumers can receive messages at the same time.
Customization – Your queues don’t have to be exactly alike—for example, you can set a default delay on a queue. You can store the contents of messages larger than 256 KB using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Amazon DynamoDB, with Amazon SQS holding a pointer to the Amazon S3 object, or you can split a large message into smaller messages.
Differences between Amazon SQS, Amazon MQ, and Amazon SNS:
Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and Amazon MQ are managed messaging services that are highly scalable and simple. The following is an overview of the differences between these services:
Amazon SQS offers hosted queues that integrate and decouple distributed software systems and components. Amazon SQS provides a generic web services API that you can access using any programming language supported by AWS SDK. Messages in the queue are typically processed by a single subscriber. Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS are often used together to create a fanout messaging application.
Amazon SNS is a publish-subscribe service that delivers messages from publishers (also known as producers) to multiple subscriber endpoints(also known as consumers). Publishers communicate asynchronously with subscribers by sending messages to a topic, which is a logical access point and communication channel. Subscribers can subscribe to an Amazon SNS topic and receive published messages using a supported endpoint type, such as Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon SQS, Lambda, HTTP, email, mobile push notifications, and mobile text messages (SMS). Amazon SNS acts as a message router and delivers messages to subscribers in real time. If a subscriber is not available at the time of message publication, the message is not stored for later retrieval.
Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service that provides compatibility with industry-standard messaging protocols such as Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). Amazon MQ currently supports Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ engine types.
| Resource type | Amazon SNS | Amazon SQS | Amazon MQ |
| Synchronous | No | No | Yes |
| Asynchronous | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Queues | No | Yes | Yes |
| Publisher-subscriber messaging | Yes | No | Yes |
| Message brokers | No | No | Yes |
Both Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS are recommended for new applications that can benefit from nearly unlimited scalability and simple APIs. We recommend Amazon MQ for migrating applications from existing message brokers that rely on compatibility with APIs such as JMS or protocols such as Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), MQTT, OpenWire, and Simple Text Oriented Message Protocol (STOMP).
