SQS Queues and SNS Notifications - Now Best Friends

The Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) are important "glue" components for scalable, cloud-based applications (see the Reference Architectures in the AWS Architecture Center to learn more about how to put them to use in your own applications).

One common design pattern is called "fanout." In this pattern, a message published to an SNS topic is distributed to a number of SQS queues in parallel. By using this pattern, you can build applications that take advantage parallel, asynchronous processing. For example, you could publish a message to a topic every time a new image is uploaded. Independent processes, each reading from a separate SQS queue, could generate thumbnails, perform image recognition, and store metadata about the image:

Today we are making it easier for you to implement the fanout pattern using a combination of SNS and SQS by giving you the ability to subscribe SQS queues to SNS topics via the AWS Management Console! There's a new menu item in the SQS page of the console:

Then you choose the desired topic:

That's all it takes!

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Enno Shioji]

Hi, is the publishing of message to SQS by SNS reliable? As in, is it guaranteed that the SNS will always successfully post a notification (message) on all SQS queues that are subscribed, upon every post to SNS?

[Jeff Barr]

Hi Enno, the publishing of messages to SQS via SNS is reliable. To prevent messages from being lost, all messages published to Amazon SNS are stored redundantly across multiple availability zones.