🔰Amazon SQS : A Case Study🔰

6 min readMar 1, 2021

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) is a distributed message queuing service introduced by Amazon in late 2004.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a secure, durable, and available hosted queue that lets you integrate and decouple distributed software systems and components. It supports programmatic sending of messages via web service applications as a way to communicate over the Internet. SQS is intended to provide a highly scalable hosted message queue that resolves issues arising from the common producer-consumer problem or connectivity between producer and consumer.

It provides a generic web services API that you can access using any programming language that the AWS SDK supports.

Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available.

SQS offers two types of message queues:

Standard Queues (default) -Standard queues offer maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery.
FIFO Queues (First-In-First-Out) -SQS FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent.

How it works

SQS Visibility Timeout

The visibility timeout is the amount of time that the message is invisible in the SQS Queue after a reader picks up that message.
If the provided job is processed before the visibility time out expires, the message will then be deleted from the Queue. If the job is not processed within that time, the message will become visible again and another reader will process it. This could result in the same message being delivered twice.
The Default Visibility Timeout is 30 seconds.
Visibility Timeout can be increased if your task takes more than 30 seconds.
The maximum Visibility Timeout is 12 hours.

What are the benefits of dead-letter queues?

The main task of a dead-letter queue is handling message failure. A dead-letter queue lets you set aside and isolate messages that can’t be processed correctly to determine why their processing didn’t succeed. Setting up a dead-letter queue allows you to do the following:

Configure an alarm for any messages delivered to a dead-letter queue.
Examine logs for exceptions that might have caused messages to be delivered to a dead-letter queue.
Analyze the contents of messages delivered to a dead-letter queue to diagnose software or the producer’s or consumer’s hardware issues.
Determine whether you have given your consumer sufficient time to process message.

Benefits of using Amazon SQS

Security : You can control who can send messages to and receive messages from an Amazon SQS queue.
Server-side encryption (SSE): lets you transmit sensitive data by protecting the contents of messages in queues using keys managed in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).
Durability: For the safety of your messages, Amazon SQS stores them on multiple servers. Standard queues support at-least-once message delivery, and FIFO queues support exactly-once message processing.
Availability — Amazon SQS uses redundant infrastructure to provide highly-concurrent access to messages and high availability for producing and consuming messages.
Scalability — Amazon SQS can process each buffered request independently, scaling transparently to handle any load increases or spikes without any provisioning instructions.
Reliability — Amazon SQS locks your messages during processing, so that multiple producers can send and multiple consumers can receive messages at the same time.
Customization — Your queues don’t have to be exactly alike — for example, you can set a delay on a queue. You can store the contents of messages larger than 256 KB using Amazon S3 or Amazon DynamoDB, with Amazon SQS holding a pointer to the Amazon S3 object, or you can split a large message into smaller messages.

Important Points to remember :

SQS is pull-based, not push-based.
Messages are 256 KB in size.
Messages are kept in a queue from 1 minute to 14 days.
The default retention period is 4 days.
It guarantees that your messages will be processed at least once.

Pricing for Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS has no upfront costs. The first million monthly requests are free. After that, you pay based on the number and content of requests, and the interactions with Amazon S3 and the AWS Key Management Service.

✦ redBus : Case Study

redBus 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 EC2, Elastic load balancing, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3,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

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.

Benefits of AWS

Reduced costs by up to 40%
Reduced website latency by 4x
Able to instantly replicate test environments, which in turn reduces time to market