Item: Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon SQS is being used by several teams internally for various functions. SQS works great in conjunction with Lambda and other AWS services to serve needs for both internal applications as well as customer facing applications.

Pros and Cons

Simple to start: SQS is simple to get started with and configure if you are new to using both AWS and if you are new to using this particular service.
Pricing: Pricing for SQS is surprisingly less complicated than other services in AWS and is pretty reasonable.

Might not be the best solution if you aren't "all in" with AWS: Many AWS services rope you in to being all in with AWS. It becomes pretty difficult to implement full solutions using AWS without using their entire stack. SQS is not really any different in that respect.
There are free services that can do the same/similar things to SQS that may make it easier to implement outside AWS, or at least in part outside of AWS.

Alternatives Considered

Apache Kafka, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and RabbitMQ

To be blunt: Amazon SQS was the simplest to implement given our requirements. Other services in this space work just as well, and SQS does not have any benefits outside of being the easiest to implement when using an otherwise fully AWS stack. AWS itself even has other solutions that would work just as well, however, SQS had the most reasonable pricing model for our given situation. That will certainly not always be the case, but in several of the instances where we are using it, it just made the most sense.

Key Insights

Do you think Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) again?

Yes

Other Software Used

AWS CodePipeline, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon Fargate, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Web Services, Atom, Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS), Chef, Consul, Docker, GitHub, Jekyll, Hugo, Jenkins, Kubernetes, MS SharePoint, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Windows Server, CentOS, New Relic, PagerDuty, Okta Workforce Identity, Secret Server, ServiceNow, Slack, Terraform, Trello, monday.com, Lucidchart, Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash), Bitbucket, Gitlab, HashiCorp Vault, Atlassian Confluence, Jira Software

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Support Rating

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.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) - Easy because it's there

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)