Sign In to the Console
Amazon Simple Queue Service
Developer Guide

AWS Documentation » Amazon Simple Queue Service » Developer Guide » What Is Amazon Simple Queue Service?

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 and it can be accessed by any programming language that the AWS SDK supports.

Amazon SQS supports both standard and FIFO queues. For more information, see What Type of Queue Do I Need?

What Are the Main Benefits of Amazon SQS?

  • Security – You control who can send messages to and receive messages from an Amazon SQS queue.

    Server-side encryption (SSE) lets you transmit sensitive data by protecting the contents of messages in queues using keys managed in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

  • Durability – To ensure 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.

  • 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.

How Is Amazon SQS Different from Amazon MQ or Amazon SNS?

Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS are queue and topic services that are highly scalable, simple to use, and don't require you to set up message brokers. We recommend these services for new applications that can benefit from nearly unlimited scalability and simple APIs.

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service that provides compatibility with many popular message brokers. We recommend Amazon MQ for migrating applications from existing message brokers that rely on compatibility with APIs such as JMS or protocols such as AMQP, MQTT, OpenWire, and STOMP.

What Type of Queue Do I Need?

Standard Queue FIFO Queue

Unlimited Throughput – Standard queues support a nearly unlimited number of transactions per second (TPS) per API action.

At-Least-Once Delivery – A message is delivered at least once, but occasionally more than one copy of a message is delivered.

Best-Effort Ordering – Occasionally, messages might be delivered in an order different from which they were sent.

High Throughput – By default, FIFO queues support up to 3,000 messages per second, per API action (SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, or DeleteMessage), with batching. To request a limit increase, file a support request. FIFO queues support up to 300 messages per second, per API action (SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, or DeleteMessage) without batching.

Exactly-Once Processing – A message is delivered once and remains available until a consumer processes and deletes it. Duplicates aren't introduced into the queue.

First-In-First-Out Delivery – The order in which messages are sent and received is strictly preserved.

Send data between applications when the throughput is important, 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.

Send data between applications when the order of events is important, for example:

  • Ensure that user-entered commands are executed in the right order.

  • Display the correct product price by sending price modifications in the right order.

  • Prevent a student from enrolling in a course before registering for an account.

How Can I Get Started with Amazon SQS?

We Want to Hear from You

We welcome your feedback. To contact us, visit the Amazon SQS Discussion Forum.