Cyberstrategics

Does Amazon SQS and other “messaging as a service” applications mean that companies can start to think about reducing their ongoing expenses of licensed or hosted messaging systems?

According to Amazon, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed components of their applications that perform different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Amazon SQS makes it easy to build an automated workflow, working in close conjunction with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the other AWS infrastructure web services.

Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon’s web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service. Any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or special firewall configurations. Components of applications using Amazon SQS can run independently, and do not need to be on the same network, developed with the same technologies, or running at the same time.

Functionality:

• Developers can create an unlimited number of Amazon SQS queues, each of which can send and receive an unlimited number of messages.
• New messages can be added to a queue at any time. The message body can contain up to 8 KB of text in any format.
• A computer can check a queue at any time for messages waiting to be read.
• A message is “locked” while a computer is processing it, keeping other computers from trying to process it simultaneously. If processing fails, the lock will expire and the message will again be available.
• Messages can be retained in queues for up to 4 days.
• Developers can access Amazon SQS through standards-based SOAP and Query interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.

It may be possible that some software companies selling messaging and SOA software will find they have been “out-serviced” by companies offering cloud-messaging services!

Filed under: CEP News and Events, Complex Event Processing, EAI ESB & SOA, EDA, Event Processing, Event-Driven Architecture, Message-Oriented Middleware, Virtualization