Case Study of AWS SQS

What is AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS)?

SQS is a web service that gives you access to a message queue that can be used to store messages while waiting for the messages to process. It is a distributed queue system that enables web service applications to quickly and reliably queue messages that one component in the application generates and another consumes.

In other words, a queue is a temporary repository for messages that are awaiting process.

You can also think of SQ5 as a buffer between two components, producing data and a component consuming data. This means that a queue consuming data. This means that a queue could potentially resolve issues that come about when a producer is producing at a larger rate than what the consumer can handle.

Two types of Queues

1. Standard (default)
2. FIFO

Standard Queues

Standard queues let you have nearly an unlimited number of transactions per second. Standard queues guarantee that a message is delivered at least once. They also provide best-effort ordering which ensures that messages are gradually delivered in the same order as they are received.

FIFO Queues

The most important feature of the FIFO (First In First Out) queue is the first in first out delivery coupled with exactly-once processing.

The order in which messages are sent and received are strictly preserved and a message is delivered once and remains available until a consumer processes it and deletes it.

Queues are a powerful way of combining software architectures. They allow for asynchronous communication between different systems and are especially useful when the throughput of the systems is unequal. Amazon offers their version of queues with Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service).

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Benefits :

Eliminate administrative overhead :

AWS manages all ongoing operations and underlying infrastructure needed to provide a highly available and scalable message queuing service. With SQS, there is no upfront cost, no need to acquire, install, and configure messaging software, and no time-consuming build-out and maintenance of supporting infrastructure. SQS queues are dynamically created and scale automatically so you can build and grow applications quickly and efficiently.

Reliably deliver messages :

Use Amazon SQS to transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. SQS lets you decouple application components so that they run and fail independently, increasing the overall fault tolerance of the system. Multiple copies of every message are stored redundantly across multiple availability zones so that they are available whenever needed.

Keep sensitive data secure :

You can use Amazon SQS to exchange sensitive data between applications using server-side encryption (SSE) to encrypt each message body. Amazon SQS SSE integration with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) allows you to centrally manage the keys that protect SQS messages along with keys that protect your other AWS resources. AWS KMS logs every use of your encryption keys to AWS CloudTrail to help meet your regulatory and compliance needs.

Scale elastically and cost-effectively :

Amazon SQS leverages the AWS cloud to dynamically scale based on demand. SQS scales elastically with your application so you don’t have to worry about capacity planning and pre-provisioning. There is no limit to the number of messages per queue, and standard queues provide nearly unlimited throughput. Costs are based on usage which provides significant cost saving versus the “always-on” model of self-managed messaging middleware.

 Use Case :

redBus Case Study (2014) :

Red Bus is an Indian travel agency that specializes in bus travel throughout India by selling bus tickets throughout the country. Tickets are purchased through the company’s Website or through the Web services of its agents and partners. The company also offers software, on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis, which gives bus operators the option of handling their own ticketing and managing their own inventories. To date, the company says they have sold over 30 million bus tickets and has more than 1750 bus operators using the software to manage their operations.

The Challenge:

The company previously ran its operations from a traditional data center by purchasing and renting its systems and infrastructure. In addition to the expense, several logistical problems evolved from this arrangement. The biggest problem was that the infrastructure could not effectively handle processing fluctuations, which had a negative impact on productivity. Additionally, the procurement of servers or upgrading the server configuration was an extremely time-consuming endeavor. Over time, redBus realized that a better solution was imperative—a solution that offered scalability to handle the company’s processing fluctuations. redBus looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a solution.

Why Amazon Web Services:

After testing the AWS solution on a small application for several months, the travel agency determined that it was very workable and convenient. Although redBus was quite enthusiastic about the on-demand instances and variety of instance types, several other features cemented the company’s decision to migrate completely to AWS. These features included the ability to easily manage access to servers through security groups, the easy-to-use, self-service management console, the concept of Elastic IPs, and superior support.

The company has incorporated many of the AWS products into its solution, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon CloudWatch. Charan Padmaraju, Chief Technology Officer believes that “with features like Elastic Load Balancing and multiple availability zones, AWS provides the required infrastructure to build for redundancy and auto-failover. When you incorporate these in your system/application design, you can achieve high reliability and scale.”

The Benefits:

Amazon Simple Queue Service Tutorial — Benefits

Since migrating to AWS, redBus has seen measurable improvements in the bottom line. Padmaraju says, “By scaling up and down dynamically based on the load, we maintain performance as well as minimize cost. With the time savings that the IT and development staffs obtain from the AWS solution, AWS gives us an overall cost-benefit of about 30-40%.” He adds, “By hosting at [the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region], redBus.in gained significantly in terms of website performance by way of reduced latency (about 4x). This is a great advantage when the customers are from India.”

Of the many excellent characteristics of AWS, perhaps the most significant to redBus is the ability to “instantly replicate the whole setup on-demand for testing by creating and destroying instances on demand for experimentation, thereby reducing the time to market.” Less time to market translates to increased profitability and success.

The travel agency anticipates expanding the AWS solution to include Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for monitoring, alerts, and intercommunication. “Amazon SQS is an especially good solution for enabling messaging between external applications and our applications,” says Padmaraju.

Since joining forces with AWS, redBus has gained the freedom to experiment on new solutions and applications at minimal cost, increased the efficiency of its operations, and improved its profitability.

Conclusion

Hence, we studied that the AWS SQS helps in sending and processing an unlimited number of messages and in any region. Message payloads consist of 256KB of text which can be in any format. Send and read messages can be done simultaneously. Amazon SQS queries can share anonymously or with some specific AWS accounts. The contents of the message of AWS SQS can secure using keys managed by the AWS Key Management Service. This helps a lot for the user to use SQS in an efficient manner.