Amazon SQS Functionality

• Developers can create an unlimited number of Amazon SQS queues with an unlimited number of messages.

• A queue can be created in 3 regions – US-East (Northern Virginia) Region, US-West (Northern California) Region and EU (Ireland) Region
• The message body can contain up to 8 KB of text in any format.
• Messages can be retained in queues for up to 4 days.
• Messages can be sent and read simultaneously.

• When a message is received, it becomes “locked” while being processed. This keeps other computers from processing the message simultaneously. If the message processing fails, the lock will expire and the message will be available again. In the case where the application needs more time for processing, the “lock” timeout can be changed dynamically via the ChangeMessageVisibility operation.
• Developers can access Amazon SQS through standards-based SOAP and Query interfaces.
• Developers can securely share Amazon SQS queues with others. Queues can be shared with other AWS accounts and Anonymously. Queue sharing can also be restricted by IP address and time-of-day.

Service Highlights

Amazon SQS provides significant advantages over the complexity of home-grown messaging systems or the ongoing expense of licensed or hosted systems.

Reliable – Amazon SQS runs within Amazon’s high-availability data centers, so queues will be available whenever applications need them. To prevent messages from being lost or becoming unavailable, all messages are stored redundantly across multiple servers and data centers.

Simple – Developers can get started with Amazon SQS by using only five APIs: CreateQueue, SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, ChangeMessageVisibility, and DeleteMessage. Additional APIs are available to provide advanced functionality. In all cases, the SOAP and query APIs can be used with virtually any language and platform.

Scalable – Amazon SQS was designed to enable an unlimited number of computers to read and write an unlimited number of messages at any time.

Secure – Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that messages stored in Amazon SQS queues are secured against unauthorized access.

Inexpensive – No up-front or fixed expenses. The only costs of sending messages through Amazon SQS are small per-request handling fees and data transfer fees.

Using Amazon SQS with Other AWS Infrastructure Web Services

Amazon SQS can be used with Amazon EC2, as well as Amazon S3 and Amazon SimpleDB, to make applications more flexible and scalable. A common use case is to create an integrated and automated workflow, where multiple components or modules need to communicate with each other, but can’t all process the same amount of work simultaneously. In this case, SQS queues carry messages to be processed in an orderly fashion by the user’s application running on Amazon EC2 instances. The Amazon EC2 instances can read the queue, process the job, and then post the results as messages to another SQS queue (possibly for further processing by another application). Because Amazon EC2 allows applications to scale up and down dynamically, application developers can easily vary the number of compute instances based on the amount of work in the SQS queues, to ensure that jobs are executed in a timely manner.

For example, here is how a video transcoding website uses Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, Amazon S3, and Amazon SimpleDB together. End users submit videos to be transcoded to the website. The videos are stored in Amazon S3, and a message (“the request message”) is placed in an Amazon SQS queue (“the incoming queue”) with a pointer to the video and to the target video format in the message. The transcoding engine, running on a set of Amazon EC2 instances, reads the request message from the incoming queue, retrieves the video from Amazon S3 using the pointer, and transcodes the video into the target format. The converted video is put back into Amazon S3 and another message (“the response message”) is placed in another Amazon SQS queue (“the outgoing queue”) with a pointer to the converted video. At the same time, metadata about the video (e.g., format, date created and length) can be indexed into Amazon SimpleDB for easy querying. During this whole workflow, a dedicated Amazon EC2 instance can constantly monitor the incoming queue and, based on the number of messages in the incoming queue, is able to dynamically adjust the number of transcoding Amazon EC2 instances to meet customers’ response time requirements.

Pricing

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your monthly bill using AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

Requests

• $0.01 per 10,000 Amazon SQS Requests ($0.000001 per Request)

Amazon SQS requests are CreateQueue, ListQueues, DeleteQueue, SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, ChangeMessageVisibility, DeleteMessage, SetQueueAttributes, GetQueueAttributes, AddPermision, and RemovePermission

Data Transfer

The pricing below is based on data transferred “in” and “out” of Amazon SQS.

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon SQS. Data transferred between Amazon SQS and Amazon EC2 within a single region is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred between Amazon SQS and Amazon EC2 in different regions will be charged at Internet Data Transfer rates on both sides of the transfer.

(Amazon SQS is sold by Amazon Web Services LLC.)

Resources

Developer Resources

view all

• WSDL
• Documentation
• Release Notes
• Sample Code & Libraries
• Developer Tools
• Articles & Tutorials
• Community Forum

Additional Product Information

• FAQs
• Whitepaper: Using Amazon EC2 and SQS (pdf)
• Migration Guide
• Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement
• Service Health Dashboard

Related Services

• AWS Premium Support
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Detailed Description

Basic Queue Requests

Amazon SQS employs a simple interface that is easy to use and highly flexible. The following requests are provided:

• CreateQueue: Create queues for use with your AWS account.
• ListQueues: List your existing queues.
• DeleteQueue: Delete one of your queues.
• SendMessage: Add any data entries to a specified queue.
• ReceiveMessage: Return one or more messages from a specified queue.
• ChangeMessageVisibility: Change the visibility timeout of previously received message.
• DeleteMessage: Remove a previously received message from a specified queue.
• SetQueueAttributes: Control queue settings like the amount of time that messages are locked after being read so they cannot be read again.
• GetQueueAttributes: See information about a queue like the number of messages in it.
• AddPermission: Add queue sharing for another AWS account for a specified queue.
• RemovePermission: Remove an AWS account from queue sharing for a specified queue.

Amazon SQS Message Lifecycle

Messages that are stored in Amazon SQS have a lifecycle that is easy to manage but ensures that all messages are processed.

1. A system that needs to send a message will find an Amazon SQS queue, and use SendMessage to add a new message to it.
2. A different system that processes messages needs more messages to process, so it calls ReceiveMessage, and this message is returned.
3. Once a message has been returned by ReceiveMessage, it will not be returned by any other ReceiveMessage until the visibility timeout has passed. This keeps multiple computers from processing the same message at once.
4. If the system that processes messages successfully finishes working with this message, it calls DeleteMessage, which removes the message from the queue so no one else will ever process it. If this system fails to process the message, than it will be read by another ReceiveMessage call as soon as the visibility timeout passes.

Previous WSDL Versions

The current version of Amazon SQS is WSDL version 2009-02-01 which is completely backwards compatible with WSDL 2008-01-01. As announced in February 2008, WSDL versions 2007-05-01 and 2006-04-01 have been deprecated and beginning May 6, 2009 will not accept new users on these versions. Existing customers for the deprecated WSDL versions will have until November 6, 2009 to migrate their applications to a supported Amazon SQS WSDL version. Note – usage of Amazon SQS with these older WSDL versions will continue to be charged according to the previous pricing schedule, which for most developers results in higher charges. Therefore we recommend migrating your applications to a supported Amazon SQS WSDL version as soon as possible.

Note that some libraries or applications may still be built upon the previous version(s) of the service (2007-05-01 or 2006-04-01). If you use a library or application that consumes Amazon SQS, please make sure you check with its provider to understand which version of the service is being used, and therefore which pricing plan will apply to you.

Intended Usage and Restrictions

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement