Amazon SQS vs MQTT

Overview

Amazon SQS

Stacks2.8K

Followers2.0K

Votes171

MQTT

Stacks635

Followers577

Votes7

Amazon SQS vs MQTT: What are the differences?

Amazon SQS and MQTT are both messaging protocols used for communication between distributed systems. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Scalability and Distribution: Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that allows you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. It provides unlimited throughput and can handle an unlimited number of messages. On the other hand, MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a lightweight publish-subscribe messaging protocol designed for low-bandwidth, high-latency or unreliable networks. It is ideal for IoT applications and devices with limited resources.
Messaging Patterns: Amazon SQS supports both standard and FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queues. Standard queues provide best-effort ordering of messages while FIFO queues guarantee exactly-once processing of messages. MQTT, on the other hand, follows the publish-subscribe messaging pattern. Publishers send messages to a topic, and subscribers can receive those messages by subscribing to the topic.
Batching and Message Size: In Amazon SQS, messages can be sent and received in batches, allowing you to improve throughput and reduce costs. The maximum size of a single message in SQS is 256KB. In MQTT, messages are sent individually without any batching options. The maximum size of a message in MQTT can vary depending on the implementation.
Security and Authentication: Amazon SQS integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), allowing you to control access to your queues using IAM policies. It also supports server-side encryption for message data at rest. MQTT provides its own security mechanisms such as SSL/TLS encryption for secure communication. It also supports authentication and access control through username and password or X.509 certificates.
Persistence and Retention: Amazon SQS guarantees the durability of messages by storing them redundantly across multiple servers. Messages are retained until they are explicitly deleted or their retention period expires. MQTT does not provide built-in message persistence. Once a message is delivered to subscribers, it is not stored on the server and is not available for retrieval later.
Delivery Guarantees: Amazon SQS provides at-least-once message delivery. This means that a message is delivered to a consumer at least once, but duplicate messages may be delivered. MQTT offers different levels of Quality of Service (QoS), including at-most-once (0), at-least-once (1), and exactly-once (2) delivery. This allows you to choose the level of delivery guarantee based on your application's requirements.

In summary, SQS is a fully-managed message queuing service that scales well and supports various messaging patterns, while MQTT is a lightweight protocol designed for IoT applications with limited resources and operates on a publish-subscribe model.

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Advice on Amazon SQS, MQTT

MITHIRIDI

Software Engineer at LightMetrics

May 8, 2020

Needs adviceon

Amazon SQS

Amazon 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 SQS	MQTT
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.	It was designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium.
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 2.8K	Stacks 635
Followers 2.0K	Followers 577
Votes 171	Votes 7
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 Difficult to configure 2 Proprietary 2 Has a max message size (currently 256K) 1 Has a maximum 15 minutes of delayed messages only	Pros 3 Varying levels of Quality of Service to fit a range of 2 Very easy to configure and use with open source tools 2 Lightweight with a relatively small data footprint Cons 1 Easy to configure in an unsecure manner

What are some alternatives to Amazon SQS, MQTT?

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

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 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

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

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

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 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

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

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.

Related Comparisons

Amazon SQS vs MQTT: What are the differences?

Amazon SQS and MQTT are both messaging protocols used for communication between distributed systems. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Scalability and Distribution: Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that allows you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. It provides unlimited throughput and can handle an unlimited number of messages. On the other hand, MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a lightweight publish-subscribe messaging protocol designed for low-bandwidth, high-latency or unreliable networks. It is ideal for IoT applications and devices with limited resources.
Messaging Patterns: Amazon SQS supports both standard and FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queues. Standard queues provide best-effort ordering of messages while FIFO queues guarantee exactly-once processing of messages. MQTT, on the other hand, follows the publish-subscribe messaging pattern. Publishers send messages to a topic, and subscribers can receive those messages by subscribing to the topic.
Batching and Message Size: In Amazon SQS, messages can be sent and received in batches, allowing you to improve throughput and reduce costs. The maximum size of a single message in SQS is 256KB. In MQTT, messages are sent individually without any batching options. The maximum size of a message in MQTT can vary depending on the implementation.
Security and Authentication: Amazon SQS integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), allowing you to control access to your queues using IAM policies. It also supports server-side encryption for message data at rest. MQTT provides its own security mechanisms such as SSL/TLS encryption for secure communication. It also supports authentication and access control through username and password or X.509 certificates.
Persistence and Retention: Amazon SQS guarantees the durability of messages by storing them redundantly across multiple servers. Messages are retained until they are explicitly deleted or their retention period expires. MQTT does not provide built-in message persistence. Once a message is delivered to subscribers, it is not stored on the server and is not available for retrieval later.
Delivery Guarantees: Amazon SQS provides at-least-once message delivery. This means that a message is delivered to a consumer at least once, but duplicate messages may be delivered. MQTT offers different levels of Quality of Service (QoS), including at-most-once (0), at-least-once (1), and exactly-once (2) delivery. This allows you to choose the level of delivery guarantee based on your application's requirements.

Amazon SQS vs MQTT

Overview