Amazon Web Services (AWS) Provides the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), a managed message queue service which supports the safe decoupling and distribution of different components in a cloud infrastructure and cloud applications.
If you are looking to build something that just requires a simple queue service (as the name implies) this is great for it. You might look elsewhere though if you get into more complicated needs. This is also very well suited if you are already using other services with AWS and intend to fully build whatever you are building in AWS. If you are looking for a mixed environment -- SQS is not for you
BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.
It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow.
Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors.
If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites.
Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day.
Online blogging and documentation for SQS is great. There are many examples of implementing it and if you look hard enough, more than likely there are examples that meet the exact case with which you are working
BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.
The most comparable products are RabbitMQ, and perhaps ActiveMQ. Until recently, AWS did not offer a managed ActiveMQ product. Running RabbitMQ will never be to my team's competitive advantage; we wanted a managed service.
BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are Microsoft SQL Server. Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.
A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware.
A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business.
A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts.
