messaging-overview

Comparison of managed messaging and streaming solutions available on AWS platform.

Parameter	SQS / SQS FIFO	SNS / SNS FIFO	EventBridge	Kinesis Data Streams	IoT Core Broker	MSK/Kafka (2.2.1-2.7.0)	Amazon MQ (RabbitMQ 3.8.6)	Amazon MQ (ActiveMQ 5.15 Classic)	ElastiCache (Redis 6.x)
Infrastructure	Serverless	Serverless	Serverless	Serverless	Serverless	Managed (EC2)	Managed (EC2)	Managed (EC2)	Managed (EC2)
HA	Regional	Regional	Regional	Regional	Regional	Multi-AZ	Multi-AZ	Multi-AZ	Multi-AZ
SLA	99.90%	99.90%	99.99%	99.90%	99.90%	99.90%	99.90%	99.90%	99.90%
Order	Best-effort/FIFO	best-effort/FIFO(1)	best effort (no order) (3)	Ordered (within a shard)	N (9)	Y	Y	Y	Y (Streams) / N (Pub/Sub)
Delivery	At least once / exactly once (FIFO)	At least once / exactly once (FIFO) (4)	At least once	At least once	QoS0 (can drop message), QoS1 (at least once) (9)	At least once, At most once, Exactly once (55,56)	At least once, At most once (54)	Depends on protocol (exactly once is possible with MQTT/QoS2)(14)	At least once (Streams) / At most once (Pub/Sub) (15)
Routing	N	Y (via filtering) (62)	Y (63)	Y (b/w shards using partition key) (64)	Y (65)	N (66)	Y (67)	Y (with Apache Camel) (68, 69)	Y (Pub/Sub pattern matching) (70) / N (Streams)
Max message size	256Kb	256 Kb	256 Kb	1MB	128 Kb	1 MB (default)	128Mb (in v3.8.0+)/2Gb (up to v3.7.0) (61)	some Gb (limited by RAM, disk size) (59, 60)	32 Mb/min* (Pub/Sub) (75) / 512 Mb (Streams) (76)
Max rate, req/s	3000msg/sec (batch mode)	3000msg/sec or 10MB/sec (batch mode)	2400 put msg/s; 4500 invoc/s (FRA, soft limit),	1000 msg/sec/shard (max 1Mb/s) (24)	100 req/sec, 512Kb/s (31)	nM msg/sec (11, 12)	1M msg/sec (10)	22K msg/sec (58)	1M msg/sec (16)
Retention, max	14 days	6h (SMTP, SMS, mobile push) /23d (SQS, Lambda) (19)	24h (5)	1Y	1h (retry/QoS1) (31), 7d (QoS1 persistent sessions, 42)	forever (limited by disk)	Limited by disk? (13)	forever (limited by disk)	forever (Streams, limited by disk) (72) / N (PubSub) (71)
Replay	N (2)	N (2)	Y (3)	Y	N	Y	N (25)	N (27)	Y (Streams) / N (Pub/Sub)
P2P vs Pub/Sub	P2P	Pub/Sub	Pub/Sub	Pub/Sub	Pub/Sub	Pub/Sub	Pub/Sub	Pub/Sub	*
Push vs Pull	Pull	Push	Push	Both (77)	Push	Pull	Both	Both	Pull (Streams) (74) / Pull (Pub/Sub) (73)
Encryption in transit	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y (18)
Encryption at rest	Y	Y	Y	Y	?	Y	Y	Y	Y (17)
DLQ	Y	Y (7)	Y (23)	N (21, 22)	N	Y (via Connect/emulation) (30)	Y (28)	Y (26)	Y (29)
Message Schema (on AWS)	N	N	Y (33)	Y (with KPL/KCL) (34)	N	Y (32,35)	N	N	N
Standards, Protocols, Transports	JMS1.1, REST (36)	REST	REST	REST	REST, WebSockets, MQTT* (37)	Proprietary	AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, HTTP, WebSockets (38), JMS1.1 (39)	AMQP, AUTO, MQTT, OpenWire, REST, RSS/Atom, STOMP, WSIF, WS Notification, XMPP, JMS 1.1 (40,41,57)	Proprietary
Data type	Text, XML, JSON (46)	Text, JSON (45)	JSON (47)	Base64-ed blob (44)	JSON, Binary (43)	Binary (48)	*	*	Binary-safe K/V (49)
Processing Latency	0.13-1.3sec (6,53)	seconds (51)	0.5 sec (4)	200ms-1s / 70ms (with enhanced fan-out) (50,77)	?	5-48ms (52,53)	1-120ms (52,53)	49ms (53)	1ms (16)

(1) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-event-driven-architectures-with-amazon-sns-fifo/ and https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/amazon-sns-introduces-fifo-topics-with-strict-ordering-and-deduplication-of-messages/

(2) Replay implementation with SNS + 2 x SQS https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-fork-pipeline-as-subscriber.html#sns-fork-event-replay-pipeline

(3) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-archive-and-replay-events-with-amazon-eventbridge/

(4) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/fifo-message-dedup.html and SNS vs EventBridge https://cloudonaut.io/eventbridge-vs-sns/

(5) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/create-eventbridge-scheduled-rule.html

(6) https://softwaremill.com/amazon-sqs-performance-latency/

(7) DLQ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-sns-adds-support-for-dead-letter-queues-dlq/ and https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/designing-durable-serverless-apps-with-dlqs-for-amazon-sns-amazon-sqs-aws-lambda/

(8) https://aws.highspot.com/items/5f5fe9b260e9cc1120781e22?lfrm=srp.0#31 - comparison of different solutions

(9) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/mqtt.html

(10) https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/rabbitmq-hits-one-million-messages-per-second-on-google-compute-engine

(11) https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/Kafka%20At%20Scale.pdf

(12) https://engineering.linkedin.com/kafka/benchmarking-apache-kafka-2-million-writes-second-three-cheap-machines and 15K msg/sec https://aiven.io/blog/benchmarking-kafka-write-throughput-performance-2019-update

(13) https://www.rabbitmq.com/ttl.html

(14) https://activemq.apache.org/components/artemis/documentation/2.3.0/protocols-interoperability.html

(15) https://redislabs.com/solutions/use-cases/messaging/

(16) https://devopedia.org/redis-streams

(17) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/at-rest-encryption.html

(18) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/in-transit-encryption.html

(19) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-dead-letter-queues.html

(20) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazon-mq/latest/developer-guide/data-protection.html

(21) https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/aws-lambda-3-pro-tips-for-working-with-kinesis-streams?utm_source=medium_blog&utm_medium=redirect&utm_campaign=medium_blog

(22) https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/use-sns-to-retry-failed-kinesis-events

(23) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/rule-dlq.html

(24) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/service-sizes-and-limits.html

(25) https://www.cloudkarafka.com/blog/which-service-rabbitmq-vs-apache-kafka.html

(26) https://activemq.apache.org/message-redelivery-and-dlq-handling

(27) History can be emulated via Mirrored queues http://activemq.apache.org/mirrored-queues.html

(28) https://www.rabbitmq.com/dlx.html

(29) https://redis.io/topics/streams-intro

(30) https://www.confluent.io/blog/kafka-connect-deep-dive-error-handling-dead-letter-queues/ and https://towardsdatascience.com/dead-letter-queue-dlq-in-kafka-29418e0ec6cf

(31) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/iot-core.html

(32) https://medium.com/@stephane.maarek/introduction-to-schemas-in-apache-kafka-with-the-confluent-schema-registry-3bf55e401321

(33) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-amazon-eventbridge-schema-registry-and-discovery-in-preview/

(34) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/kpl-with-schemaregistry.html

(35) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/glue/latest/dg/schema-registry-integrations.html#schema-registry-integrations-amazon-msk

(36) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/sqs-java-message-service-jms-client.html

(37) https://www.hivemq.com/blog/hivemq-cloud-vs-aws-iot/

(38) https://www.rabbitmq.com/protocols.html

(39) https://www.rabbitmq.com/jms-client.html

(40) https://activemq.apache.org/protocols

(41) https://activemq.apache.org/components/artemis/documentation/1.0.0/using-jms.html

(42) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/iot-core.html#message-broker-limits

(43) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/binary-payloads.html

(44) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kinesis/latest/APIReference/API_Record.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/fundamental-stream.html

(45) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/api/API_Publish.html

(46) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/APIReference/API_SendMessage.html

(47) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/APIReference/API_PutEvents.html

(48) https://kafka.apache.org/protocol#protocol_types

(49) https://redis.io/commands/XADD; https://redis.io/topics/data-types-intro

(50) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/kinesis-low-latency.html

(51) https://www.pubnub.com/blog/amazon-sns-pubnub-differences-pubsub/

(52) https://www.confluent.io/blog/kafka-fastest-messaging-system/

(53) https://softwaremill.com/mqperf/

(54) https://www.rabbitmq.com/reliability.html

(55) https://kafka.apache.org/0110/documentation/streams/core-concepts

(56) https://medium.com/@andy.bryant/processing-guarantees-in-kafka-12dd2e30be0e

(57) https://activemq.apache.org/

(58) https://activemq.apache.org/performance.html

(59) https://activemq.apache.org/configuring-wire-formats.html see maxFrameSize = MAX_LONG - theoretical maximum

(60) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48645631/is-there-a-max-size-to-activemqs-or-generic-jms-message-size - 1Gb

(61) https://www.cloudamqp.com/blog/what-is-the-message-size-limit-in-rabbitmq.html

(62) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/fifo-message-filtering.html

(63) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/reducing-custom-code-by-using-advanced-rules-in-amazon-eventbridge/

(64) https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/kinesis/data-streams/features/

(65) https://aws.amazon.com/iot-core/faqs/

(66) https://www.cloudamqp.com/blog/when-to-use-rabbitmq-or-apache-kafka.html

(67) https://www.cloudamqp.com/blog/part4-rabbitmq-for-beginners-exchanges-routing-keys-bindings.html

(68) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/integrating-amazon-mq-with-other-aws-services-via-apache-camel/

(69) https://camel.apache.org/manual/latest/faq/how-does-camel-work-with-activemq.html https://camel.apache.org/components/3.8.x/activemq-component.html

(70) https://redis.io/topics/pubsub

(71) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59540563/what-are-the-main-differences-between-redis-pub-sub-and-redis-stream

(72) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60019790/redis-streams-with-persistent-storage

(73) https://redislabs.com/ebook/part-2-core-concepts/chapter-3-commands-in-redis/3-6-publishsubscribe/

(74) https://redis.io/commands/xread

(75) https://redis.io/topics/clients - for the given case the max message size needs to be calculate backwards from the 32Mb/min limit.

(76) Assuming an argument of XADD is a string https://redis.io/commands/xadd, infer a max string size from https://redis.io/topics/data-types

(77) https://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/streams/latest/dev/building-consumers.html