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.
Here’s how SQS works:
- You create a queue by specifying its name and other optional parameters, such as the maximum message size and message retention period.
- You can then send, receive, and delete messages from the queue using the SQS API, the AWS Management Console, or the AWS SDKs.
- When you send a message to a queue, SQS stores it and assigns it a unique identifier called a message ID.
- You can specify the maximum time that a message should be available for processing before it is automatically deleted from the queue. This is known as the message visibility timeout.
- When you receive a message from the queue, SQS sets the message’s visibility timeout to the value you specify (between 0 seconds and 12 hours). While the message is in this state, it is not available to other consumers.
- If the consumer processing the message fails to delete it before the visibility timeout expires, the message becomes available to other consumers to process.
- You can also configure SQS to automatically delete messages that have been in the queue for a specified period of time, known as the message retention period.
SQS is a reliable, scalable, and fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and coordinate the components of a distributed application. It helps you build distributed applications that are fault-tolerant, message-driven, and asynchronous, and enables you to scale your applications elastically by eliminating the need to manage the infrastructure required to support them.