What kind of EC2 instances do I need to pull out the messages from an sqs queue system?

Question

I am getting familiar with queue services in Amazon.

SQS is pull based not push based, so I have to have an EC2 instance pulling out the messages from the queue.

Are those instances EC2 AMI VM? or when I created an sqs queue ... do I have to associate to a special EC2 instance?

Why we can lose an EC2 instance when they are reading queues?

Answer 1

Any computer on the Internet can make a ReceiveMessage() API call. This could be an Amazon EC2 instance, or an AWS Lambda function, or a container or even the computer under your desk.

The typical architecture is that some 'worker' code is running somewhere, and it polls the Amazon SQS queue to ask for a message. If a message is available, the worker then processes the message and then deletes the message.

So, simply include the code to 'pull' the message within the program that will process the message.