StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Background Jobs
  4. Message Queue
  5. AWS Lambda vs RabbitMQ

AWS Lambda vs RabbitMQ

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ
Stacks21.8K
Followers18.9K
Votes558
GitHub Stars13.2K
Forks4.0K
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Stacks26.0K
Followers18.8K
Votes432

AWS Lambda vs RabbitMQ: What are the differences?

  1. 1. Invocation Model: AWS Lambda is an event-driven computing service that executes functions in response to events, such as changes to data in an Amazon S3 bucket or a new record being inserted into a DynamoDB table. In contrast, RabbitMQ is a message broker that allows applications to communicate by sending and receiving messages. It uses a publish-subscribe model where producers send messages to exchanges and consumers receive messages from queues created for subscriptions.

  2. 2. Scaling: AWS Lambda automatically scales the execution environment to handle incoming requests. It can rapidly scale out to support a high volume of concurrent invocations, ensuring that functions are executed without the need for manual intervention. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, requires manual scaling of consumer applications to handle increased message load. It provides features like message acknowledgments and prefetch limits to control the flow of messages and avoid overwhelming consumer applications.

  3. 3. Event Sources: AWS Lambda can be triggered by various event sources such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch Events, and more. This allows developers to build serverless applications that respond to events generated by AWS services. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, is not limited to AWS services and can be integrated with any applications or systems capable of communicating over protocols like AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol).

  4. 4. Execution Environment: AWS Lambda provides a fully managed execution environment for running functions, abstracting away the underlying infrastructure and operating system. Developers can focus on writing code without worrying about provisioning servers or managing resources. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, requires setting up and managing the RabbitMQ message broker infrastructure, including servers, queues, exchanges, and connections.

  5. 5. Message Persistence: AWS Lambda does not provide built-in message persistence. It functions as an event-driven compute service and does not retain messages for subsequent processing by default. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, provides message persistence by storing messages in queues until they are consumed or expire. This ensures that messages are not lost in case of consumer failures or system restarts.

  6. 6. Message Delivery Guarantees: AWS Lambda provides at-least-once execution semantics, meaning that functions are guaranteed to be invoked at least once, but they can be invoked multiple times in case of failures or retries. RabbitMQ provides different levels of message delivery guarantees, including at-most-once (default) and at-least-once delivery options. Developers can choose the level of reliability based on their application requirements.

In Summary, AWS Lambda and RabbitMQ differ in terms of invocation model, scaling behavior, event sources, execution environment, message persistence, and message delivery guarantees.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on RabbitMQ, AWS Lambda

Tim
Tim

CTO at Checkly Inc.

Sep 18, 2019

Needs adviceonHerokuHerokuAWS LambdaAWS Lambda

When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:

  • Developer Experience trumps everything.
  • AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
  • If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.

The setup

Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:

  • Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
  • Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
  • Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
  • Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
  • Heroku
  • Lambda

It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?

I chopped that question up into the following categories:

  • Developer Experience / DX 🤓
  • Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
  • Cost 💵
  • Lock in 🔐

Read the full post linked below for all details

357k views357k
Comments
viradiya
viradiya

Apr 12, 2020

Needs adviceonAngularJSAngularJSASP.NET CoreASP.NET CoreMSSQLMSSQL

We are going to develop a microservices-based application. It consists of AngularJS, ASP.NET Core, and MSSQL.

We have 3 types of microservices. Emailservice, Filemanagementservice, Filevalidationservice

I am a beginner in microservices. But I have read about RabbitMQ, but come to know that there are Redis and Kafka also in the market. So, I want to know which is best.

933k views933k
Comments
Pulkit
Pulkit

Software Engineer

Oct 30, 2020

Needs adviceonDjangoDjangoAmazon SQSAmazon SQSRabbitMQRabbitMQ

Hi! I am creating a scraping system in Django, which involves long running tasks between 1 minute & 1 Day. As I am new to Message Brokers and Task Queues, I need advice on which architecture to use for my system. ( Amazon SQS, RabbitMQ, or Celery). The system should be autoscalable using Kubernetes(K8) based on the number of pending tasks in the queue.

474k views474k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda

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

AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.

Robust messaging for applications;Easy to use;Runs on all major operating systems;Supports a huge number of developer platforms;Open source and commercially supported
Extend other AWS services with custom logic;Build custom back-end services;Completely Automated Administration;Built-in Fault Tolerance;Automatic Scaling;Integrated Security Model;Bring Your Own Code;Pay Per Use;Flexible Resource Model
Statistics
GitHub Stars
13.2K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
4.0K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
21.8K
Stacks
26.0K
Followers
18.9K
Followers
18.8K
Votes
558
Votes
432
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 235
    It's fast and it works with good metrics/monitoring
  • 80
    Ease of configuration
  • 60
    I like the admin interface
  • 52
    Easy to set-up and start with
  • 22
    Durable
Cons
  • 9
    Too complicated cluster/HA config and management
  • 6
    Needs Erlang runtime. Need ops good with Erlang runtime
  • 5
    Configuration must be done first, not by your code
  • 4
    Slow
Pros
  • 129
    No infrastructure
  • 83
    Cheap
  • 70
    Quick
  • 59
    Stateless
  • 47
    No deploy, no server, great sleep
Cons
  • 7
    Cant execute ruby or go
  • 3
    Compute time limited
  • 1
    Can't execute PHP w/o significant effort

What are some alternatives to RabbitMQ, AWS Lambda?

Kafka

Kafka

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

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.

Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS

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.

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.

Azure Functions

Azure Functions

Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems.

Google Cloud Run

Google Cloud Run

A managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It's serverless by abstracting away all infrastructure management.

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.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase