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  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Task Scheduling
  4. Cloud Task Management
  5. Amazon SQS vs Amazon SWF

Amazon SQS vs Amazon SWF

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon SWF
Amazon SWF
Stacks35
Followers79
Votes0
Amazon SQS
Amazon SQS
Stacks2.8K
Followers2.0K
Votes171

Amazon SQS vs Amazon SWF: What are the differences?

<Introduction>
1. **Message Processing Model**: Amazon SQS is a message queuing service that decouples the components of a cloud application, whereas Amazon SWF is a fully-managed state tracker and task coordinator service. SQS focuses on message delivery and processing, while SWF provides control over workflow coordination.

2. **Order Preservation**: Amazon SQS does not guarantee the order of delivery, as it offers at-least-once message delivery, which means messages may be delivered out of order or duplicated. On the other hand, Amazon SWF ensures the ordered execution of tasks within a workflow, maintaining the sequence of tasks.

3. **Visibility Timeout and Retention Period**: SQS has a visibility timeout feature, allowing a message to remain invisible to other consumers for a specific period. In contrast, Amazon SWF has a built-in retention period for workflow tasks to be replayed if needed, ensuring task completion even if some workers fail.

4. **Concurrency and Scaling**: SQS allows multiple consumers to read messages from the same queue concurrently, enabling horizontal scaling. SWF, on the other hand, manages task distribution among workers and handles scaling automatically based on the workload and requirements.

5. **Error Handling and Retry Policies**: Amazon SQS provides limited error handling capabilities such as dead-letter queues for storing failed messages, while Amazon SWF offers more advanced error-handling mechanisms, including task retries, timeouts, and failure notifications.

6. **Workflow Management**: Amazon SWF is more suitable for managing long-running, complex workflows with human tasks and decision-making elements, whereas Amazon SQS is primarily designed for simple message passing between distributed systems.

In Summary, Amazon SQS and Amazon SWF differ in message processing model, order preservation, visibility timeout, concurrency, error handling, and workflow management.

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Advice on Amazon SWF, Amazon SQS

MITHIRIDI
MITHIRIDI

Software Engineer at LightMetrics

May 8, 2020

Needs adviceonAmazon SQSAmazon SQSAmazon MQAmazon MQ

I want to schedule a message. Amazon SQS provides a delay of 15 minutes, but I want it in some hours.

Example: Let's say a Message1 is consumed by a consumer A but somehow it failed inside the consumer. I would want to put it in a queue and retry after 4hrs. Can I do this in Amazon MQ? I have seen in some Amazon MQ videos saying scheduling messages can be done. But, I'm not sure how.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon SWF
Amazon SWF
Amazon SQS
Amazon SQS

Amazon Simple Workflow allows you to structure the various processing steps in an application that runs across one or more machines as a set of “tasks.” Amazon SWF manages dependencies between the tasks, schedules the tasks for execution, and runs any logic that needs to be executed in parallel. The service also stores the tasks, reliably dispatches them to application components, tracks their progress, and keeps their latest state.

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

Maintaining application state;Tracking workflow executions and logging their progress;Holding and dispatching tasks;Controlling which tasks each of your application hosts will be assigned to execute
A queue can be created in any region.;The message payload can contain up to 256KB of text in any format. Each 64KB ‘chunk’ of payload is billed as 1 request. For example, a single API call with a 256KB payload will be billed as four requests.;Messages can be sent, received or deleted in batches of up to 10 messages or 256KB. Batches cost the same amount as single messages, meaning SQS can be even more cost effective for customers that use batching.;Long polling reduces extraneous polling to help you minimize cost while receiving new messages as quickly as possible. When your queue is empty, long-poll requests wait up to 20 seconds for the next message to arrive. Long poll requests cost the same amount as regular requests.;Messages can be retained in queues for up to 14 days.;Messages can be sent and read simultaneously.;Developers can get started with Amazon SQS by using only five APIs: CreateQueue, SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, ChangeMessageVisibility, and DeleteMessage. Additional APIs are available to provide advanced functionality.
Statistics
Stacks
35
Stacks
2.8K
Followers
79
Followers
2.0K
Votes
0
Votes
171
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 62
    Easy to use, reliable
  • 40
    Low cost
  • 28
    Simple
  • 14
    Doesn't need to maintain it
  • 8
    It is Serverless
Cons
  • 2
    Has a max message size (currently 256K)
  • 2
    Difficult to configure
  • 2
    Proprietary
  • 1
    Has a maximum 15 minutes of delayed messages only

What are some alternatives to Amazon SWF, Amazon SQS?

Kafka

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Celery

Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

NSQ

NSQ

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized topologies without single points of failure, enabling fault tolerance and high availability coupled with a reliable message delivery guarantee. See features & guarantees.

ActiveMQ

ActiveMQ

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ

The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.

Apache NiFi

Apache NiFi

An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic.

Gearman

Gearman

Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events.

Memphis

Memphis

Highly scalable and effortless data streaming platform. Made to enable developers and data teams to collaborate and build real-time and streaming apps fast.

IronMQ

IronMQ

An easy-to-use highly available message queuing service. Built for distributed cloud applications with critical messaging needs. Provides on-demand message queuing with advanced features and cloud-optimized performance.

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