Amazon DynamoDB vs Amazon SQS

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Amazon DynamoDB

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Amazon DynamoDB vs Amazon SQS: What are the differences?

Introduction: Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon SQS are both services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for different purposes. While DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database service, SQS is a fully managed message queuing service. Despite being part of the AWS ecosystem, there are significant differences between DynamoDB and SQS.

  1. Data Storage vs Message Queuing: The key difference between DynamoDB and SQS lies in their primary functionality. DynamoDB is designed for storing and retrieving structured and semi-structured data, offering a highly scalable and fast access database solution. On the other hand, SQS is a message queue service focused on decoupling and distributing messages between different components of a distributed system. It provides reliable and scalable message exchange between microservices and applications.

  2. Data Structure: DynamoDB follows a schema-less data model, allowing you to create tables without defining a fixed schema upfront. This flexibility makes it easy to handle evolving data requirements. In contrast, SQS does not store data persistently like a database but rather acts as a temporary repository for messages. Messages sent to SQS are stored until they are consumed, empowering asynchronous communication patterns in distributed systems.

  3. Real-time vs Event-driven: DynamoDB is optimized for real-time data access and is capable of serving millions of requests per second with low latency. It can handle high read and write throughput requirements for dynamic workloads. In comparison, SQS excels in event-driven architectures, where components can communicate asynchronously by sending and receiving messages. It provides benefits such as scalability and fault tolerance by enabling loose coupling between services.

  4. Data Size and Complexity: DynamoDB supports complex data structures, including nested attributes, arrays, and maps, allowing you to store and query rich document-like data. It also provides features like automatic data partitioning and global secondary indexes for efficient and scalable data management. In contrast, SQS has a simple message structure and is primarily used for passing small-sized messages between different services or components.

  5. Data Consistency: DynamoDB offers two consistency models: eventually consistent and strongly consistent reads. Eventually consistent reads maximize availability and offer the lowest latency, while strongly consistent reads provide a more up-to-date view of the data. On the other hand, SQS guarantees the order of messages within a single queue but does not provide strong consistency across multiple queues. It ensures "at least once" delivery semantics, where a message might be delivered multiple times but not skipped.

  6. Cost and Pricing Model: DynamoDB pricing is primarily based on throughput capacity (read and write), storage, and data transfer. It offers different options for provisioned capacity and on-demand capacity modes, allowing you to optimize costs based on your application requirements. SQS pricing mainly depends on the number of requests and message retention. It offers different types of queues, including standard and FIFO (First-In-First-Out), with varying features and pricing.

In summary, Amazon DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database for structured data storage and real-time access, while Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service for reliable and asynchronous communication between components. DynamoDB offers schema-less data storage, real-time querying, and flexible data models, whereas SQS focuses on decoupling services through message-based communication, ensuring fault tolerance and scalability.

Advice on Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon SQS
Pulkit Sapra
Needs advice
on
Amazon SQSAmazon SQSKubernetesKubernetes
and
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

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.

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Replies (1)
Anis Zehani
Recommends
on
KafkaKafka

Hello, i highly recommend Apache Kafka, to me it's the best. You can deploy it in cluster mode inside K8S, thus you can have a Highly available system (also auto scalable).

Good luck

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Meili Triantafyllidi
Software engineer at Digital Science · | 6 upvotes · 437.4K views
Needs advice
on
Amazon SQSAmazon SQSRabbitMQRabbitMQ
and
ZeroMQZeroMQ

Hi, we are in a ZMQ set up in a push/pull pattern, and we currently start to have more traffic and cases that the service is unavailable or stuck. We want to: * Not loose messages in services outages * Safely restart service without losing messages (ZeroMQ seems to need to close the socket in the receiver before restart manually)

Do you have experience with this setup with ZeroMQ? Would you suggest RabbitMQ or Amazon SQS (we are in AWS setup) instead? Something else?

Thank you for your time

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Replies (2)
Shishir Pandey
Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

ZeroMQ is fast but you need to build build reliability yourself. There are a number of patterns described in the zeromq guide. I have used RabbitMQ before which gives lot of functionality out of the box, you can probably use the worker queues example from the tutorial, it can also persists messages in the queue.

I haven't used Amazon SQS before. Another tool you could use is Kafka.

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Kevin Deyne
Principal Software Engineer at Accurate Background · | 5 upvotes · 197.1K views
Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

Both would do the trick, but there are some nuances. We work with both.

From the sound of it, your main focus is "not losing messages". In that case, I would go with RabbitMQ with a high availability policy (ha-mode=all) and a main/retry/error queue pattern.

Push messages to an exchange, which sends them to the main queue. If an error occurs, push the errored out message to the retry exchange, which forwards it to the retry queue. Give the retry queue a x-message-ttl and set the main exchange as a dead-letter-exchange. If your message has been retried several times, push it to the error exchange, where the message can remain until someone has time to look at it.

This is a very useful and resilient pattern that allows you to never lose messages. With the high availability policy, you make sure that if one of your rabbitmq nodes dies, another can take over and messages are already mirrored to it.

This is not really possible with SQS, because SQS is a lot more focused on throughput and scaling. Combined with SNS it can do interesting things like deduplication of messages and such. That said, one thing core to its design is that messages have a maximum retention time. The idea is that a message that has stayed in an SQS queue for a while serves no more purpose after a while, so it gets removed - so as to not block up any listener resources for a long time. You can also set up a DLQ here, but these similarly do not hold onto messages forever. Since you seem to depend on messages surviving at all cost, I would suggest that the scaling/throughput benefit of SQS does not outweigh the difference in approach to messages there.

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We are building a social media app, where users will post images, like their post, and make friends based on their interest. We are currently using Cloud Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database. We are looking for another database like Amazon DynamoDB; how much this decision can be efficient in terms of pricing and overhead?

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Replies (1)
William Frank
Data Science and Engineering at GeistM · | 2 upvotes · 107.6K views
Recommends

Hi, Akash,

I wouldn't make this decision without lots more information. Cloud Firestore has a much richer metamodel (document-oriented) than Dynamo (key-value), and Dynamo seems to be particularly restrictive. That is why it is so fast. There are many needs in most applications to get lightning access to the members of a set, one set at a time. Dynamo DB is a great choice. But, social media applications generally need to be able to make long traverses across a graph. While you can make almost any metamodel act like another one, with your own custom layers on top of it, or just by writing a lot more code, it's a long way around to do that with simple key-value sets. It's hard enough to traverse across networks of collections in a document-oriented database. So, if you are moving, I think a graph-oriented database like Amazon Neptune, or, if you might want built-in reasoning, Allegro or Ontotext, would take the least programming, which is where the most cost and bugs can be avoided. Also, managed systems are also less costly in terms of people's time and system errors. It's easier to measure the costs of managed systems, so they are often seen as more costly.

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MITHIRIDI PRASANTH
Software Engineer at LightMetrics · | 4 upvotes · 271.4K views
Needs advice
on
Amazon MQAmazon MQ
and
Amazon SQSAmazon SQS
in

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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Replies (1)
Andres Paredes
Lead Senior Software Engineer at InTouch Technology · | 1 upvotes · 207.5K views
Recommends
on
Amazon SQSAmazon SQS

Mithiridi, I believe you are talking about two different things. 1. If you need to process messages with delays of more 15m or at specific times, it's not a good idea to use queues, independently of tool SQM, Rabbit or Amazon MQ. you should considerer another approach using a scheduled job. 2. For dead queues and policy retries RabbitMQ, for example, doesn't support your use case. https://medium.com/@kiennguyen88/rabbitmq-delay-retry-schedule-with-dead-letter-exchange-31fb25a440fc I'm not sure if that is possible SNS/SQS support, they have a maximum delay for delivery (maxDelayTarget) in seconds but it's not clear the number. You can check this out: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-message-delivery-retries.html

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Pros of Amazon DynamoDB
Pros of Amazon SQS
  • 62
    Predictable performance and cost
  • 56
    Scalable
  • 35
    Native JSON Support
  • 21
    AWS Free Tier
  • 7
    Fast
  • 3
    No sql
  • 3
    To store data
  • 2
    Serverless
  • 2
    No Stored procedures is GOOD
  • 1
    ORM with DynamoDBMapper
  • 1
    Elastic Scalability using on-demand mode
  • 1
    Elastic Scalability using autoscaling
  • 1
    DynamoDB Stream
  • 62
    Easy to use, reliable
  • 40
    Low cost
  • 28
    Simple
  • 14
    Doesn't need to maintain it
  • 8
    It is Serverless
  • 4
    Has a max message size (currently 256K)
  • 3
    Triggers Lambda
  • 3
    Easy to configure with Terraform
  • 3
    Delayed delivery upto 15 mins only
  • 3
    Delayed delivery upto 12 hours
  • 1
    JMS compliant
  • 1
    Support for retry and dead letter queue
  • 1
    D

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Cons of Amazon DynamoDB
Cons of Amazon SQS
  • 4
    Only sequential access for paginate data
  • 1
    Scaling
  • 1
    Document Limit Size
  • 2
    Has a max message size (currently 256K)
  • 2
    Proprietary
  • 2
    Difficult to configure
  • 1
    Has a maximum 15 minutes of delayed messages only

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