Amazon SQS will be 20 years old later this year. It still offers precisely what it advertises-a simple queue service. It's also still great. Duri

Queues aren't the right abstraction

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2024-03-28 16:30:02

Amazon SQS will be 20 years old later this year. It still offers precisely what it advertises-a simple queue service. It's also still great. During Prime Day 2022, SQS handled over 70 million messages per second at peak. If you want a queue, this, or other time-tested solutions like RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ, work well.

Many workloads within an application are long-running: notifications, data processing, billing, etc. These operations can be time-consuming or resource-intensive and you don't want them blocking the rest of the application. Message queues offload these functions from the critical path (or thread) and allow you to execute them asynchronously. The queue will enable applications to remain responsive while tasks are processed in the background.

At a higher level, queues are a way to build more efficient, functional, and reliable applications. When you add queues to your application, you go from having to fit every operation into a request-response framework to having the ability to decouple and prioritize workloads. This allows you to design your application around the optimal user experience rather than being constrained by the limitations of synchronous processing. By leveraging queues, you can create applications that are more responsive, scalable, and resilient to failures.