AWS - SQS, SWF, SNS, Elastic Transcoder, API Gateway

What is SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a secure, durable, and available hosted queue that lets you integrate and decouple distributed software systems and components. Amazon SQS offers common constructs such as dead-letter queues and cost allocation tags. It provides a generic web services API and it can be accessed by any programming language that the AWS SDK supports.

 

Two types of queues

• Standard Queues
• FIFO Queues (First In First Out)

 

What is SWF

A growing number of applications are relying on asynchronous and distributed processing. The scalability of such applications is the primary motivation for using this approach. By designing autonomous distributed components, developers have the flexibility to deploy and scale out parts of the application independently if the load on the application increases. Another motivation is the availability of cloud services. As application developers start taking advantage of cloud computing, they have a need to combine their existing on-premises assets with additional cloud-based assets. Yet another motivation for the asynchronous and distributed approach is the inherent distributed nature of the process being modeled by the application; for example, the automation of an order-fulfillment business process may span several systems and human tasks.

Developing such applications can be complicated. It requires that you coordinate the execution of multiple distributed components and deal with the increased latencies and unreliability inherent in remote communication. To accomplish this, you would typically need to write complicated infrastructure involving message queues and databases, along with the complex logic to synchronize them.

The Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF) makes it easier to develop asynchronous and distributed applications by providing a programming model and infrastructure for coordinating distributed components and maintaining their execution state in a reliable way. By relying on Amazon SWF, you are freed to focus on building the aspects of your application that differentiate it.

 

What is SNS

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a flexible, fully managed pub/sub messaging and mobile notifications service for coordinating the delivery of messages to subscribing endpoints and clients. With SNS you can fan-out messages to a large number of subscribers, including distributed systems and services, and mobile devices. It is easy to set up, operate, and reliably send notifications to all your endpoints – at any scale. You can get started using SNS in a matter of minutes using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, or using the AWS SDK with just three simple APIs. SNS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating dedicated messaging software and infrastructure.

 

What is Elastic Transcoder

Amazon Elastic Transcoder is media transcoding in the cloud. It is designed to be a highly scalable, easy to use and a cost effective way for developers and businesses to convert (or “transcode”) media files from their source format into versions that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs.

 

API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create an API that acts as a “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your back-end services, such as workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), code running on AWS Lambda, or any web application.

Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management. Amazon API Gateway has no minimum fees or startup costs. You pay only for the API calls you receive and the amount of data transferred out.