sqs

AWS SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service for decoupling and scaling microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

Table of Contents

• Core Concepts
• Common Patterns
• CLI Reference
• Best Practices
• Troubleshooting
• References

Core Concepts

Queue Types

Type	Description	Use Case
Standard	At-least-once, best-effort ordering	High throughput
FIFO	Exactly-once, strict ordering	Order-sensitive processing

Key Settings

Setting	Description	Default
Visibility Timeout	Time message is hidden after receive	30 seconds
Message Retention	How long messages are kept	4 days (max 14)
Delay Seconds	Delay before message is available	0
Max Message Size	Maximum message size	256 KB

Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ)

Queue for messages that failed processing after maxReceiveCount attempts.

Common Patterns

Create a Standard Queue

AWS CLI:

aws sqs create-queue \
  --queue-name my-queue \
  --attributes '{
    "VisibilityTimeout": "60",
    "MessageRetentionPeriod": "604800",
    "ReceiveMessageWaitTimeSeconds": "20"
  }'

boto3:

import boto3

sqs = boto3.client('sqs')

response = sqs.create_queue(
    QueueName='my-queue',
    Attributes={
        'VisibilityTimeout': '60',
        'MessageRetentionPeriod': '604800',
        'ReceiveMessageWaitTimeSeconds': '20'  # Long polling
    }
)
queue_url = response['QueueUrl']

Create FIFO Queue

aws sqs create-queue \
  --queue-name my-queue.fifo \
  --attributes '{
    "FifoQueue": "true",
    "ContentBasedDeduplication": "true"
  }'

Configure Dead-Letter Queue

# Create DLQ
aws sqs create-queue --queue-name my-queue-dlq

# Get DLQ ARN
DLQ_ARN=$(aws sqs get-queue-attributes \
  --queue-url https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123456789012/my-queue-dlq \
  --attribute-names QueueArn \
  --query 'Attributes.QueueArn' --output text)

# Set redrive policy on main queue
aws sqs set-queue-attributes \
  --queue-url https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123456789012/my-queue \
  --attributes "{
    \"RedrivePolicy\": \"{\\\"deadLetterTargetArn\\\":\\\"${DLQ_ARN}\\\",\\\"maxReceiveCount\\\":\\\"3\\\"}\"
  }"