How Industry Uses AWS SQS
We have discussed about various services and various DevOps tools. We have talked about various tools for deployment, automation, managing etc. But what happens if any important information i.e. message is needed to be delivered but the service which has to receive the message is down. This may result in some service disruption and missing details and finally lead to bad impression in front of client.
To avoid this we can add message queue program in between source program and database. The middle program is very reliable and it gets message from the source program and stores it and sends it to database.
We can use message queue program by ourselves or we can use managed service by AWS known as SQS. So, let’s get some more details about AWS SQS.
Amazon Simple Queue Service
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. Get started with SQS in minutes using the AWS console, Command Line Interface or SDK of your choice, and three simple commands.
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.
Benefits
Eliminate 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.
Now, as we have understood what SQS is and what are benefits of using it. We can have a look at how various companies use AWS SQS and how it solved their issue.
Case studies
Oyster.com
AWS Services Used: Amazon EC2 & Amazon SQS.
Oyster.com uses Amazon Web Services to store and process images for their website. The team uses Amazon EC2 and Amazon SQS in an integrated workflow to generate the sizes they need for each photo. SQS communicates the photos that need to be processed and the status of the jobs.
Capital One
AWS Services Used: Amazon SQS
Capital One is modernizing their retail message queuing by migrating from self-managed message-oriented middleware systems to Amazon SQS. Capital One is using SQS to migrate several core banking applications to the cloud to ensure high availability and cost efficiency while simplifying administrative complexity and overhead.
NASA
AWS Services Used: Amazon SNS & Amazon SQS
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.
From these case studies we have understood how some of the big companies including NASA are using AWS SQS and have got benefitted.
I hope the article was able to give you a brief insight. If you have any feedback or suggestion, you can comment below.
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