Getting started with Amazon SQS standard queues - Amazon Simple Queue Service

Getting started with Amazon SQS standard queues

Amazon SQS offers standard as the default queue type. Standard queues support a nearly unlimited number of API calls per second, per API action (SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, or DeleteMessage). Standard queues support at-least-once message delivery. However, occasionally (because of the highly distributed architecture that allows nearly unlimited throughput), more than one copy of a message might be delivered out of order. Standard queues provide best-effort ordering which ensures that messages are generally delivered in the same order as they're sent.

Amazon SQS redundantly stores a message in more than one availability zone (AZ) before a SendMessage is acknowledged. Because message copies are stored in multiple AZs, no single computer, network, or AZ failure can make messages inaccessible.

For information about how to create and configure queues using the Amazon SQS console, see Create a queue (console). For Java examples, see Amazon SQS Java SDK examples.

You can use standard message queues in many scenarios, as long as your application can process messages that arrive more than once and out of order, for example:

  • Decouple live user requests from intensive background work – Let users upload media while resizing or encoding it.

  • Allocate tasks to multiple worker nodes – Process a high number of credit card validation requests.

  • Batch messages for future processing – Schedule multiple entries to be added to a database.

For quotas related to standard queues, see Quotas.

For best practices of working with standard queues, see Recommendations for Amazon SQS standard and FIFO queues.