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rabbitmqmigrationamqpamazon-sqsamazon-sns

Migrate from AMQP to Amazon SNS/SQS - need to understand concepts

I am well experienced with the RabbitMQ and AMQP protocol, and have built a system with patterns for Commands, Requests and Events.

Now I am going to build a system running on AWS Lambda and therefore use SNS, SQS etc. I want to understand the "mapping" between these things.

What are the equivalent to an exchange in AMQP? What are the equivalent to a routing key?

How to set up queue bindings for fanout, direct and topic exchanges (or similar) in SNS and SQS?

How did other people handle this? To me it looks like RabbitMQ is a tool built to fit the usual needs of a message bus, where AWS provides blocks and you have to setup/build the functionality yourself. Am I right?

Solution

  • What are the equivalent to an exchange in AMQP?

    The closest concept might be SNS, as you can configure a SNS topic to publish to n SQS queues. Then when you write to that topic, each subscribed queue gets a message. You can also write messages directly to SQS queues if you like.

    What are the equivalent to a routing key?

    There's no real equivalent for this. The SNS-to-SQS bindings don't allow for any additional filtering/control beyond topic-to-queue bindings. You could approximate routing by having multiple SNS topics i.e. each topic is a "routing key".

    How to set up queue bindings for fanout, direct and topic exchanges (or similar) in SNS and SQS?

    • Fanout: write to SNS topic and every subscribed queue will receive the same message.
    • Direct: write directly to SQS queue(s), or SNS topic that has only those queues subscribed.
    • Topic: create SNS topic and subscribe queues accordingly.

    How did other people handle this?

    I used RabbitMQ before AWS messaging, so I went through the same learning curve. AWS doesn't provide as many exchange/routing bells & whistles, but in my experience you can get close enough with some combination of SNS topics and SQS queues.