As businesses scale up and expand, their IT infrastructure can become increasingly complex. A growing number of systems, applications, and services can lead to a lack of visibility and control, which in turn can hamper operations and lead to poor customer experiences.
3 services can help us build Event Driven applications on AWS namely Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), and Amazon EventBridge. Each of these services is designed to help developers build scalable, fault-tolerant systems that can handle a high volume of events, messages, and notifications.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what these services are, when to use them, and why they’re important for businesses.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables decoupling and scaling of distributed systems and microservices. With 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 can be used to buffer requests from multiple sources, batch workloads, and handle background tasks, among other use cases. It offers reliable 1:1 Asynchronous communication.
When to use Amazon SQS:
Building distributed systems that require a high degree of decoupling between components.
When buffering requests from multiple sources and prioritizing requests
Building a task pipeline with parallel or serial processing
Decoupling producers and consumers where you have 1–1 communication need like Request-Response.
Why use Amazon SQS:
Fully managed service with high durability, scalability, and availability
Low latency and high throughput for message processing
Cost-effective, with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables the decoupling and microservices architecture of distributed systems. With SNS, you can send messages to a large number of subscribers or distributed systems, including AWS Lambda, HTTP/S endpoints, email, SMS, and mobile devices. SNS can be used to send event notifications, application alerts, and other messages across distributed systems.
SNS is ideal when building scalable enterprise applications. It offers high throughput and supports 1 to many subscribers (Fan Out)
When to use Amazon SNS:
Broadcasting messages to multiple recipients or systems
Triggering event-driven architectures with loosely coupled components.
Sending notifications to mobile devices, email, or SMS
Why use Amazon SNS:
Fully managed service with high durability, scalability, and availability
Flexible message delivery options, including email, SMS, mobile push notifications, and HTTP/S endpoints.
Cost-effective, with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Amazon EventBridge
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that enables building event-driven architectures and integrating with a wide range of AWS services, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and custom applications. With EventBridge, you can create rules that match incoming events and trigger actions, such as AWS Lambda functions, Amazon SNS topics, or AWS Step Functions. EventBridge can be used to automate workflows, build event-driven microservices, and integrate with third-party services.
Note: that every rule can have a maximum of 5 targets only.
When to use Amazon EventBridge:
Building event-driven architectures with multiple sources and destinations
Integrating with SaaS applications or third-party services
Automating workflows and building serverless microservices
Why use Amazon EventBridge:
Serverless, fully managed service with high scalability and availability
Integrates with a wide range of AWS services and third-party applications
Real-time event processing and filtering with EventBridge rules
Cost-effective, with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Conclusion
Amazon SQS, SNS, and EventBridge are powerful tools that can be used to build scalable and fault-tolerant distributed applications. Each service has its own unique features and benefits, allowing developers to choose the service that best fits their use case.
Amazon SQS provides a reliable and highly scalable message queuing service that enables decoupling and asynchronous communication between distributed application components.
Amazon SNS enables pub/sub messaging to distributed systems, making it easy to fan out messages to multiple recipients.
Amazon EventBridge provides a serverless event bus service that enables event-driven architectures, making it easy to integrate applications and automate workflows.
Event Bridge with a limitation of 5 targets can be a showstopper for businesses so ideally SNS would serve as a safer option.
I have also published a Youtube Video on the same as part of the Event Driven Series. Do watch, like and subscribe.