How would you reprocess Lambda dead-letter queue messages on demand?

Imagine this…

You have followed AWS best practices and set up a dead-letter queue (DLQ) or an OnFailure destination for every async Lambda function.

(sidebar: you should prefer Lambda Destination over DLQs, here’s why)

A message arrives in your DLQ. You are alerted right away because you have alarms on all of your DLQs.

You investigate the problem and determine that it was temporary and the message should be re-processed.

But now what?

Do you extract the payload and invoke the original function manually? What if there are hundreds of similar messages? This manual approach doesn’t scale well.

Do you use SQS’s StartMessageMoveTask API to redrive messages back to the source queue? But this API doesn’t support source queues that are not DLQs of other SQS queues. So you can’t use it with a Lambda function’s DLQ or OnFailure destination.

A good approach is to subscribe another function to the DLQ but leave the event source mapping disabled.

This way, messages would not be automatically reprocessed – that wouldn’t make sense. Instead, it can be enabled on demand if and when you decide to reprocess them.

The reprocess-function can share the same business logic as the initial processor-function.

If the queue is an OnFailure destination, then the SQS messages would contain additional wrapping (see below). The reprocess-function would unwrap the message before reprocessing the original payload.

I like this approach because it’s a simple setup and it’s a repeatable pattern.

For CDK users, you can even turn it into a L3 construct so it can be scaled to large event-driven architectures with many async functions.

What do you think of this approach? Do you have other approaches that you prefer over this?

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