AWS Messaging Services for Distributed Systems

Best Service for Delivering and Managing Messages in AWS

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Question

Your company has set up an application in AWS.

The application has been developed in-house which consists of many distributed components.

You would need a new service to deliver and manage messages for the distributed system.

Which of the following services should you suggest?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Answer - A.

The AWS Documentation mentions the following.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message oriented middleware and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work.

Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available.

Get started with SQS in minutes using the AWS console, Command Line Interface or SDK of your choice, and three simple commands.

Option B is invalid since this is used to send notifications to different endpoints.

Options C and D are invalid because either CloudWatch or CloudTrail is not a messaging system and cannot deliver or manage messages.

For more information on SQS queues, please refer to the below URL-

https://aws.amazon.com/sqs

For a distributed application with multiple components, a messaging service is necessary to ensure reliable and scalable communication between the components. Among the AWS services available for this purpose, the two most commonly used services are Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).

Option A - Suggest the usage of the SQS service for the messaging across the distributed components: Amazon SQS is a fully-managed message queuing service that enables decoupling and scaling of distributed systems and applications. It allows you to send, store, and receive messages between software components, without requiring them to be online simultaneously. With SQS, you can create message queues that store messages waiting to be processed. Each queue can have multiple producers and consumers, making it ideal for a distributed architecture. When a component finishes processing a message, it can delete it from the queue, so other components can process the same message. This ensures reliable and asynchronous communication between the components. SQS offers a variety of features, including standard and FIFO queues, dead-letter queues, message timers, and message encryption.

Option B - Suggest the usage of the SNS service for the messaging across the distributed components: Amazon SNS is a fully-managed messaging service that enables the publication and subscription of messages to topics or endpoints. It supports multiple delivery protocols, including HTTP/HTTPS, email, SMS, mobile push notifications, and AWS Lambda functions. SNS is designed for broadcasting messages to multiple recipients, rather than direct communication between components. It allows you to publish a message to a topic, which can have multiple subscribers, such as email addresses, phone numbers, or SQS queues. When a subscriber receives a message, it can trigger a process or notification. SNS offers several features, including message filtering, message attributes, mobile push notifications, and cross-region replication.

Option C - Suggest the use of CloudWatch logs to deliver and manage the messages: Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that enables you to collect and analyze metrics, logs, and events from AWS resources and applications. CloudWatch logs allow you to centralize the collection and storage of logs from different sources, such as EC2 instances, Lambda functions, and containers. However, CloudWatch logs are not designed for message delivery or management. They can be used to monitor the activity of a distributed system, but they do not provide the necessary features for message queuing, such as message order, delivery retries, and dead-letter queues.

Option D - Suggest the use of CloudTrail logs to forward and manage the logs: Amazon CloudTrail is a service that enables you to record and monitor API calls and events in AWS services and resources. It provides a log of all API activities, including the identity of the caller, the time of the API call, the request parameters, and the response elements. However, CloudTrail logs are not designed for message delivery or management. They are useful for auditing and compliance purposes, but they do not provide the necessary features for message queuing, such as message ordering, delivery retries, and dead-letter queues.

In conclusion, the best option for delivering and managing messages across distributed components in AWS is to use Amazon SQS. It provides a reliable and scalable message queuing service that enables asynchronous communication between components. Amazon SNS is a useful service for broadcasting messages to multiple endpoints, but it is not suitable for direct communication between components. Amazon CloudWatch and CloudTrail logs are not designed for message queuing and management, but they can be used for monitoring and auditing activities in a distributed system.