Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that makes it easy to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. By pairing SQS with AWS Lambda, you can build event-driven pipelines that automatically process messages at any scale. SQS provides dead-letter queues, redrive policies, and configurable visibility time-outs to ensure reliable delivery and error isolation. Meanwhile, Lambda functions offer on-demand compute with built-in retry mechanisms and customizable backoff strategies.
In this Cloud Lab, you’ll build a resilient, observable message-driven pipeline using Amazon SQS and AWS Lambda. A major part of this Cloud Lab will be performed using the AWS Command-Line Interface (AWS CLI). You’ll start by creating a primary SQS queue and configuring a dead-letter queue (DLQ) with a redrive policy. Then you’ll deploy two Lambda functions: one to process incoming messages with exponential-backoff retries, and another to reprocess messages from the DLQ.
You’ll also instrument your processing Lambda with JSON-formatted Embedded Metric Format (EMF) logs and AWS X-Ray tracing, simulate mixed traffic (both successful and faulty messages), and verify error handling and performance in Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray.
Below is the high-level architecture diagram of the system you’ll build in this Cloud Lab:
