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  1. Stackups
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  3. Background Jobs
  4. Message Queue
  5. Amazon SQS vs Azure Functions

Amazon SQS vs Azure Functions

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon SQS
Amazon SQS
Stacks2.8K
Followers2.0K
Votes171
Azure Functions
Azure Functions
Stacks785
Followers705
Votes62

Amazon SQS vs Azure Functions: What are the differences?

Developers describe Amazon SQS as "Fully managed message queuing service". 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. On the other hand, Azure Functions is detailed as "Listen and react to events across your stack". 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.

Amazon SQS can be classified as a tool in the "Message Queue" category, while Azure Functions is grouped under "Serverless / Task Processing".

Some of the features offered by Amazon SQS are:

  • 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.

On the other hand, Azure Functions provides the following key features:

  • Easily schedule event-driven tasks across services
  • Expose Functions as HTTP API endpoints
  • Scale Functions based on customer demand

"Easy to use, reliable" is the top reason why over 45 developers like Amazon SQS, while over 7 developers mention "Pay only when invoked" as the leading cause for choosing Azure Functions.

Medium, Lyft, and Coursera are some of the popular companies that use Amazon SQS, whereas Azure Functions is used by Property With Potential, OneWire, and Veris. Amazon SQS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 384 company stacks & 103 developers stacks; compared to Azure Functions, which is listed in 30 company stacks and 22 developer stacks.

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Advice on Amazon SQS, Azure Functions

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
Meili
Meili

Software engineer at Digital Science

Sep 24, 2020

Needs adviceonZeroMQZeroMQRabbitMQRabbitMQAmazon SQSAmazon SQS

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}|tool:1064| 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

500k views500k
Comments
Mark
Mark

Nov 2, 2020

Needs adviceonMicrosoft AzureMicrosoft Azure

Need advice on what platform, systems and tools to use.

Evaluating whether to start a new digital business for which we will need to build a website that handles all traffic. Website only right now. May add smartphone apps later. No desktop app will ever be added. Website to serve various countries and languages. B2B and B2C type customers. Need to handle heavy traffic, be low cost, and scale well.

We are open to either build it on AWS or on Microsoft Azure.

Apologies if I'm leaving out some info. My first post. :) Thanks in advance!

133k views133k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon SQS
Amazon SQS
Azure Functions
Azure Functions

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.

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.

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.
Easily schedule event-driven tasks across services;Expose Functions as HTTP API endpoints;Scale Functions based on customer demand;Develop how you want, using a browser-based UI or existing tools;Get continuous deployment, remote debugging, and authentication out of the box
Statistics
Stacks
2.8K
Stacks
785
Followers
2.0K
Followers
705
Votes
171
Votes
62
Pros & Cons
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
Pros
  • 14
    Pay only when invoked
  • 11
    Great developer experience for C#
  • 9
    Multiple languages supported
  • 7
    Great debugging support
  • 5
    Can be used as lightweight https service
Cons
  • 1
    Sporadic server & language runtime issues
  • 1
    Not suited for long-running applications
  • 1
    No persistent (writable) file system available
  • 1
    Poor support for Linux environments
Integrations
No integrations available
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps
Java
Java
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Node.js
Node.js
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
GitHub
GitHub
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
JavaScript
JavaScript
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB
C#
C#

What are some alternatives to Amazon SQS, Azure Functions?

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.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda

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.

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.

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.

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