DEV Community: SANTHIYA C

“Santhiya Waits for SQS: Exploring Amazon Simple Queue Service” ☁️📩

SANTHIYA C — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:45:21 +0000

Santhiya Waits for SQS: Exploring Amazon Simple Queue Service ☁️📩

Introduction

In modern applications, different components often need to communicate with each other. If one component becomes busy or temporarily unavailable, directly connecting everything can cause delays and failures. Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) solves this problem by allowing applications to communicate through messages.

Amazon SQS is a fully managed AWS service used to send, store, and receive messages between software components. It helps applications work independently and improves reliability and scalability.

What is Amazon SQS?

Amazon SQS stands for Amazon Simple Queue Service. It is a message queuing service provided by AWS.

A queue acts like a temporary waiting area for messages. One application can send a message to the queue, while another application can retrieve and process it later.

For example:

Student Application → SQS Queue → Processing Application

The sender does not have to wait for the receiver to finish processing the task.

Why was SQS created?

SQS was created to help applications communicate without being tightly connected. It is especially useful when one application produces tasks faster than another application can process them.

AWS describes SQS as a service that helps decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

How Amazon SQS Works

The basic working of SQS is simple:

A producer creates a message.
The producer sends the message to an SQS queue.
The message waits safely in the queue.
A consumer receives the message.
The consumer processes the message.
After successful processing, the message is deleted from the queue.

Simple Flow Diagram

        PRODUCER
           │
           │ Send Message
           ▼
   ┌─────────────────┐
   │    Amazon SQS   │
   │      Queue      │
   │                 │
   │  Message 1      │
   │  Message 2      │
   │  Message 3      │
   └─────────────────┘
           │
           │ Receive Message
           ▼
        CONSUMER
           │
           ▼
    Process the Task
           │
           ▼
      Delete Message

This approach means the producer and consumer do not have to be available at exactly the same time.

Key Features of Amazon SQS

Key SQS Features

Dead Letter Queues (DLQ):

A DLQ is a secondary queue targeting messages that repeatedly fail to process. If a message cannot be successfully consumed after a configured maximum receive count (e.g., 5 attempts), SQS moves it to the DLQ. This prevents "poison pill" messages (messages with bad payloads that crash consumers) from blocking main queue traffic.

Long Polling vs. Short Polling:

Short Polling (Default): The receive message request queries only a subset of SQS servers and returns immediately, even if no messages are found. This can result in empty responses and higher API transaction costs.
Long Polling: SQS waits up to 20 seconds for a message to arrive in the queue before sending a response. It is highly recommended to configure "WaitTimeSeconds > 0" to minimize empty API responses and lower transaction costs.

Delay Queues: This configuration postpones the delivery of newly added messages to the queue for a specified duration (up to 15 minutes). This is useful when background tasks require an initial cooling-off period before running.
Batch Operations: To reduce network overhead and lower transactional costs, SQS supports sending, receiving, and deleting messages in batches of up to 10 messages (or up to 256 KB) per single API call.

College/Student Use Case 🎓

Amazon SQS can be useful in a college event registration system.

Imagine that hundreds of students register for a college hackathon at the same time. Instead of immediately processing every registration request, the application can place each request into an SQS queue.

Students
   │
   ▼
Registration Website
   │
   ▼
Amazon SQS Queue
   │
   ▼
Registration Processor
   │
   ▼
College Database

The registration website can continue accepting requests while the backend processes them from the queue.

This reduces the chance of the application becoming overloaded during peak registration time.

Another example is a student project submission system, where uploaded submissions can be placed into a queue for background processing such as file validation, plagiarism checking, or result generation.

Simple Practical Example

Suppose a college application wants to process student feedback.

A producer sends a message to an SQS queue:

{
  "student_id": "ST101",
  "feedback": "The cloud workshop was useful."
}

The message is stored in the queue until a consumer receives it.

A simple AWS CLI example for sending a message is:

aws sqs send-message \
  --queue-url <QUEUE_URL> \
  --message-body "Student feedback received"

To receive a message:

aws sqs receive-message \
  --queue-url <QUEUE_URL>

After processing the message, it can be deleted using:

aws sqs delete-message \
  --queue-url <QUEUE_URL> \
  --receipt-handle <RECEIPT_HANDLE>

These operations demonstrate the basic send → receive → process → delete workflow of SQS. AWS provides CLI commands for creating queues and sending, receiving, and deleting messages.

Advantages of Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS has several advantages:

Easy to use: AWS manages the underlying queue infrastructure.
Scalable: It can handle large volumes of messages.
Reliable: Messages can remain in the queue until they are successfully processed.
Decoupling: Producers and consumers can work independently.
Flexible: Developers can choose between Standard and FIFO queues.
Secure: AWS provides encryption and access-control mechanisms.

Because of these features, SQS is useful for microservices, background processing, distributed applications, and serverless systems.

Limitations / Things to Consider

Although SQS is powerful, there are a few things to consider.

Cost

SQS follows a pay-for-use pricing model, so cost depends mainly on the number of requests and other features used. Applications with very high message traffic should monitor their usage.

Complexity

Basic SQS usage is simple, but advanced features such as FIFO queues, dead-letter queues, visibility timeout configuration, IAM permissions, and monitoring require additional understanding.

Message Size

SQS is designed for messages rather than storing large files. The maximum message size is 1 MiB. For larger data, applications can store the file in Amazon S3 and send the S3 object information through SQS.

Ordering

Standard queues do not guarantee strict ordering. If message order is important, a FIFO queue should be considered.

Conclusion

Amazon SQS is a simple but powerful AWS service for communication between applications. It provides a reliable queue where messages can wait until they are ready to be processed.

Its support for Standard and FIFO queues, visibility timeout, dead-letter queues, scalability, and security makes it useful for many real-world applications.

For a college environment, SQS can be used for systems such as event registration, student submissions, notifications, feedback processing, and background tasks.

As a student learning cloud computing, understanding SQS is valuable because it introduces an important concept in modern cloud architecture: decoupling applications so that they can work independently and reliably.

References

AWS – Amazon Simple Queue Service Documentation
Amazon SQS Documentation
AWS – Amazon SQS Standard Queues
Amazon SQS Standard Queues
AWS – Amazon SQS FIFO Queues
Amazon SQS FIFO Queues
AWS – Getting Started with Amazon SQS
Getting Started with Amazon SQS
AWS – AWS CLI SQS Commands
Amazon SQS AWS CLI Reference

CLOUD WORKSHOP DAY 1

SANTHIYA C — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 06:58:26 +0000

 **Deploying a Portfolio Website on AWS S3 and CloudFront **

Introduction

As part of my AWS learning session, I explored the fundamentals of cloud computing and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The session introduced several important AWS concepts, including:

AWS and cloud computing
Pay-as-you-go pricing
IaaS, PaaS, FaaS, SaaS and AIaaS
AWS infrastructure and regions
Amazon S3
Amazon CloudFront

As a practical exercise, I deployed my personal portfolio website using Amazon S3 and then configured Amazon CloudFront to deliver the website through a content delivery network (CDN).

This article documents the steps I followed.

1. What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that provides services for computing, storage, databases, networking, security, artificial intelligence and many other applications.

Instead of purchasing and maintaining physical servers, we can use cloud resources whenever required.

Pay-as-you-go

AWS follows a pay-as-you-go model for many services.

This means we generally pay for the resources we use rather than purchasing physical infrastructure upfront.

*2. Cloud Service Models
*
During the session, I learned about different cloud service models.

IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service

Provides infrastructure such as:

Virtual machines
Storage
Networking

Example: Amazon EC2

PaaS — Platform as a Service

Provides a platform where developers can build and deploy applications without managing all the underlying infrastructure.

FaaS — Function as a Service

Allows developers to run code without managing servers.

Example: AWS Lambda

SaaS — Software as a Service

Software is provided as a service through the internet.

AIaaS — AI as a Service

Provides artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities through cloud services.

*3. AWS Infrastructure Basics
*
AWS has a global infrastructure consisting of:

Regions
Availability Zones
Data centers

A Region is a geographical area containing multiple Availability Zones.

An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more isolated data centers within an AWS Region.

Using multiple Availability Zones helps improve the availability and reliability of applications.

*4. Amazon S3
*
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an object storage service provided by AWS.

S3 can be used to store:

Images
Videos
Documents
HTML files
CSS files
JavaScript files
Application data
Backups

S3 stores data as objects inside buckets.

Basic S3 structure
AWS Account
↓
S3
↓
Bucket
↓
Objects

For my practical exercise, I used an S3 bucket to store the files of my portfolio website.

*5. Creating the Portfolio Website
*
Before deploying the website, I created my portfolio website containing my personal and technical information.

The website consisted of files such as:

index.html
images/

The important requirement for deployment was having the website files ready to upload to S3.

6. Uploading the Portfolio to Amazon S3

The next step was to create an S3 bucket and upload the portfolio files.

Step 1 — Open Amazon S3

Open the AWS Management Console and search for:

Then select Amazon S3.

Step 2 — Create a Bucket

Click:

Create bucket

Provide a unique bucket name.

For example:

my-portfolio-website

Bucket names must be globally unique, so choose a name that is available.

Step 3 — Configure the Bucket

Configure the bucket according to the deployment approach being used.

For a public static website configuration, the required access settings and bucket policy need to be configured appropriately.

Step 4 — Upload Website Files

Open the bucket and select:

Upload → Add files

Upload the portfolio files.

For example:

index.html
images/

After uploading, the files should appear as objects inside the S3 bucket.

*7. Hosting the Portfolio Using S3
*
S3 can be used to host static websites containing files such as:

HTML
CSS
JavaScript
Images

The website's main entry point is:

index.html

After configuring static website hosting/access appropriately, the S3-hosted website can be accessed through its endpoint.

At this stage, the portfolio was successfully hosted using Amazon S3.

8. Why Use CloudFront?

Although S3 can host the website, Amazon CloudFront can be used to distribute the website content through a Content Delivery Network (CDN)without delay .

CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations.

Instead of every visitor accessing the origin directly, CloudFront can serve cached content from an edge location closer to the visitor.

Basic architecture
User
|
↓
CloudFront
|
↓
S3
Bucket
|
↓
Portfolio Website Files

This can provide benefits such as:

Faster content delivery
Global distribution
Reduced load on the origin
Better performance for users in different geographical locations

*9. Deploying the Portfolio Using CloudFront
*
After successfully hosting the portfolio in S3, I configured Amazon CloudFront.

Step 1 — Open CloudFront

From the AWS Console, search for:

CloudFront

Open the CloudFront service.

Step 2 — Create a Distribution

Select:

Create distribution

For the origin, select the S3 bucket containing the portfolio website.

Step 3 — Configure the Origin

Select the S3 bucket that contains the website files.

The CloudFront distribution uses this bucket as the origin.

If using the recommended private-S3 architecture, CloudFront should access the S3 bucket using Origin Access Control (OAC) rather than making the bucket publicly readable.

Step 4 — Configure Default Root Object

Set:

index.html

as the Default root object.

This tells CloudFront which file should be returned when a user accesses the root of the website.

Step 5 — Create Distribution

Review the configuration and create the CloudFront distribution.

CloudFront then begins deploying the distribution globally.

The deployment may take some time.

10. Accessing the Website Through CloudFront

Once the CloudFront distribution becomes available, AWS provides a CloudFront domain similar to:

https://xxxxxxxxxxxx.cloudfront.net

Opening this URL displays the portfolio website.

The final deployment therefore becomes:

Portfolio Website
↓
Amazon S3
↓
Amazon CloudFront
↓
Global Users
Conclusion

This AWS session provided a practical introduction to cloud computing and AWS services.

Starting from basic concepts such as IaaS, PaaS, FaaS and SaaS, I progressed to IAM, Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront.

The key hands-on activity was deploying my portfolio website to Amazon S3 and using Amazon CloudFront to distribute it globally.

This helped me understand how cloud services can be combined to deploy and deliver a real-world web application.