AWS SQS SendMessage Command 101: Syntax, Easy Steps & Examples

In modern Cloud Architecture, systems decouple applications into independent, smaller building blocks that are easier to develop, maintain, and deploy. Message queue provides coordination and communication between these distributed applications while improving the system’s Reliability, Performance, and Scalability. A message queue is an Asynchronous Service to service communication between Servers and Microservices Architecture. In a queue, messages are stored until they are processed and deleted, where every message is only processed once by a single customer.

Businesses can use message queues to smooth spiky workloads, decouple heavyweight processing, and buffer or batch work. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer a message queue solution called Simple Queue Service (SQS). It is a fully managed message queuing service that allows users to decouple and scale distributed systems, microservices, and serverless applications. 

In this blog, you will learn about the features and benefits of AWS SQS, along with parameters and examples of AWS SQS SendMessage.

Prerequisites

• Amazon SQS account

What is AWS SQS?

Amazon SQS is a durable, secure, scalable, and available hosted Q that lets users integrate Software Systems and Components. It’s a hosted solution provided by Amazon, so you don’t need to manage the Service Infrastructure. SQS stores messages in transit between Applications and Microservices. Amazon provides a host of web service APIs, which users can access with a programming language supported by AWS SDK.

SQS eliminates the overhead and complexity associated with managing and operating message-oriented systems. Amazon SQS has no upfront cost or minimum fee, and every user gets the first million monthly requests free under the Amazon SQS Free Tier. However, users have to pay based on the content and number of requests and their interactions with Amazon S3 and the AWS Key Management Service. 

SQS offers an API for developers to connect with the service. SQS does not work as a database, so the user can’t decide which message to receive. However, they can choose how many messages they want to receive.

The main actions in high-level are:

• Send Message: Send a request to a queue available for use by another service.
• Receive Message: Another service can request to receive pending messages in the queue.
• Delete Message: The user can remove the message from the queue upon proper processing.

Key Features of AWS SQS

Following are the features of Amazon SQS:

1) Queue Types

There are two types of queues: The standard queue and the FIFO queue. The standard queue option comes with unlimited throughput, at-least-once delivery, and best-effort ordering. FIFO queue offers high throughput, exactly-once processing, and first-in-first-out delivery features. The standard queue is useful for sending data between applications when throughput is important.

In contrast, users should use the FIFO queue when the order of events is important. The standard queue can support a nearly unlimited number of API calls per second, whereas the FIFO queue can only support up to 3,000 messages per second per API method. In the Standard queue, messages are occasionally delivered in a different order from which they were sent. Whereas the FIFO queue strictly preserves the order in which messages are sent and received.

2) Functionality

Amazon SQS offers functionalities such as batches of up to 10 messages or 256 KB; Payload size of up to 256 KB of text in any format; Unlimited queues and messages; Message retainment for up to 14 days in the queue; Queue sharing; and the ability to send and read messages simultaneously. It also offers long polling to reduce costs while receiving new messages. AWS SQS also offers Server-Side Encryption (SSE) to protect message content and Dead Letter Queues (DLQ) from handling messages that aren’t successfully processed. 

3) SQS with AWS infrastructure

You can pair the Amazon SQS messaging service with other AWS services such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Lambda, and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and Amazon S3. It helps to make distributed applications more Reliable and Scalable. 

Benefits of AWS SQS

1) Reliably Deliver Messages

With AWS SQS, users can transmit any volume of data at any output level without losing messages or requiring alternative services. Amazon SQS helps you decouple application components to run and fail separately, increasing the system’s Fault Tolerance. Multiple copies of each message unit hold on redundantly across multiple accessible zones to be out there whenever required.

2) Eliminate Administrative Overhead

AWS manages all underlying infrastructure and in-progress operations required to produce an immensely accessible and scalable message queuing service.

With AWS SQS, there’s no direct value and no need to acquire, install, and assemble the messaging package. Users don’t have to build and maintain supporting Infrastructure. Amazon SQS messaging queues are dynamically created and can scale automatically, allowing users to develop and grow applications quickly and efficiently.

3) Keep Sensitive Information Secure

You can use Amazon SQS to exchange sensitive data between applications using Server-Side Secret writing (SSE) to inscribe every message body. The AWS SQS integration with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) permits users to centrally manage the keys that guard SQS messages and keys that protect your alternative AWS resources. Every use of encryption keys is logged by AWS KMS in AWS CloudTrail.

5) Scale Elastically and Cost-Effectively

AWS SQS makes use of the AWS Cloud to scale supported demand dynamically. Amazon SQS grows and shrinks in tandem with your application. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about planning, capacity, and pre-provisioning. There’s no limit to the number of messages per queue, and the standard queue option comes with unlimited throughput. The cost of sending and receiving messages is based on usage. 

Setting up Amazon SQS

You can set up an Amazon SQS by the following steps:

Step 1: Create an AWS account

Start by creating an AWS account and open https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup to use AWS products. 

Step 2: Create an IAM user

It is best to create an IAM user for each user who needs administrative access to your company’s Amazon SQS account. Sign up to the IAM console as the account owner and enter your AWS account email address and password. Choose users and then choose to add users in the navigation pane.

Step 3: Get your access key ID and secret access key

To use Amazon SQS actions, you need an access key ID and a secret access key. If you don’t have access keys, create them from the AWS Management Console. Do not use the AWS account root user access keys unless required. 

Getting started with Amazon SQS SendMessage

Amazon SQS SendMessage allows users to deliver a message to the specified queue. 

Amazon SQS SendMessage Request Parameters

• DelaySeconds: This contains information about the length of time in seconds for which SQS will delay a specific message. The value can be between zero to 900, with a maximum value of 15 minutes. However, this feature is only available for the Standard queue. You will have to set this parameter on queue level for the FIFO queue.
• MessageAttribute: Every message contains attributes such as Name, Type, and value. 
• MessageBody: Contains the message to be sent. The minimum size is one character and the maximum size is 256 KB. The message can only be in XML, JSON, and unformatted text. These unicode characters are also allowed: #x9 | #xA | #xD | #x20 to #xD7FF | #xE000 to #xFFFD | #x10000 to #x10FFFF.
• MessageDeduplicationId: This parameter is only for FIFO (first-in-first-out) queues. Whenever there are two messages with the same MessageDeduplicationId, the second message will be accepted but won’t be delivered during the 5-minute duplication interval. 
• MessageGroupId: This parameter also applies only to FIFO (first-in-first-out) queues. When a message belongs to a specific queue, multiple receivers can process the queue. However, the session data of each user is processed in a FIFO fashion. 
• MessageSystemAttribute: Each message system attribute consists of a Name, Type, and Value.

Amazon SQS SendMessage Errors

Here are the two errors that are specific to the SendMessage function in AWS: 

AWS.SimpleQueueService.UnsupportedOperation

Error code 400. Unsupported operation.

HTTP Status Code: 400

InvalidMessageContents

The message contains characters outside the allowed set.

HTTP Status Code: 400

Amazon SQS SendMessage Examples

The following AWS SQS SendMessage example sends a message containing ‘This is a test message’ to the queue. User must URL- encode the entire URL where only the message body is URL-encoded. 

Here is the example request code:

https://sqs.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/123456789012/MyQueue/
?Action=SendMessage
&MessageBody=This+is+a+test+message
&MessageAttribute.1.Name=my_attribute_name_1
&MessageAttribute.1.Value.StringValue=my_attribute_value_1
&MessageAttribute.1.Value.DataType=String
&MessageAttribute.2.Name=my_attribute_name_2
&MessageAttribute.2.Value.StringValue=my_attribute_value_2
&MessageAttribute.2.Value.DataType=String
&Expires=2020-05-05T22%3A52%3A43PST
&Version=2012-11-05
&AUTHPARAMS

Here is an example of response code:

<SendMessageResponse>
    <SendMessageResult>
        <MD5OfMessageBody>fafb00f5732ab283681e124bf8747ed1</MD5OfMessageBody>
        <MD5OfMessageAttributes>3ae8f24a165a8cedc005670c81a27295</MD5OfMessageAttributes>
        <MessageId>5fea7756-0ea4-451a-a703-a558b933e274</MessageId>
    </SendMessageResult>
    <ResponseMetadata>
        <RequestId>27daac76-34dd-47df-bd01-1f6e873584a0</RequestId>
    </ResponseMetadata>
</SendMessageResponse>

Conclusion

In this blog, you learned about Amazon SQS and its benefits and features. You also learned about sending messages through the SQS SendMessage feature. Amazon SQS offers secure communication between web applications without installation, configuration, and build-outs. With AWS SQS, users don’t have to purchase or build a messaging infrastructure. Instead, they can easily start using Amazon’s messaging services with 1,000,000 monthly free requests under the free tier and scale as needed. In case you want to export data from a source of your choice into your desired Database/destination, then Hevo Data is the right choice for you! 

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