Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
Messaging is essential for maintaining the cohesion of distributed applications, providing resilience and the capability to build highly scalable systems. For instance, earlier this year, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) effectively handled customer order processing on Prime Day, managing a staggering 40 billion messages at an impressive rate of 10 million per second, all without any issues noticeable to customers.
While SQS and SNS have proven invaluable for cloud-native applications, many of our larger clients are already utilizing either open-source or commercially-licensed message brokers. These applications are critical, and so is the messaging infrastructure that supports them. Clients often describe the setup and ongoing management of their messaging systems as “challenging,” reporting an average of 10 hours of staff time each week dedicated to these tasks.
Introducing Amazon MQ
Today, we are excited to unveil Amazon MQ—a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ, which allows you to get started in just a few clicks! ActiveMQ is a widely-used open-source message broker that is both fast and feature-rich. It provides various capabilities including queues and topics, durable and non-durable subscriptions, as well as push-based and poll-based messaging.
As a fully managed service, Amazon MQ handles all administrative tasks related to ActiveMQ, including broker provisioning, patching, failure detection, recovery for high availability, and ensuring message durability. With Amazon MQ, you have direct access to the ActiveMQ console along with standard industry APIs and protocols for messaging, such as JMS, NMS, AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, and WebSocket. This facilitates a seamless transition from any message broker utilizing these standards to Amazon MQ—allowing you to migrate supported applications without needing to rewrite existing code.
You can set up a single-instance Amazon MQ broker for development and testing, or configure an active/standby pair that spans Availability Zones (AZs) for automatic failover. Regardless of your choice, you benefit from data replication across AZs and a pay-as-you-go pricing model for both broker instances and message storage.
Amazon MQ is fully integrated into the AWS ecosystem, leveraging AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for secure authentication and authorization to the service API. You can also utilize Amazon CloudWatch to monitor metrics such as queue depth and adjust your consumer fleet with Auto Scaling as required.
Launching an Amazon MQ Broker
To get started, simply open the Amazon MQ Console, select your preferred AWS Region, name your broker, and click on the next step.
Next, choose the instance type, indicate your preference for creating a standby, and click on Create broker (options for selecting a VPC and additional advanced settings are available).
Your broker will be up and running in just 5-10 minutes. The URLs and endpoints necessary for accessing your broker are readily available with a click. You can also access the ActiveMQ Web Console via the provided link. The broker publishes instance, topic, and queue metrics to CloudWatch.
For further information, the Amazon MQ Developer Guide is a useful resource.
Available Now
Amazon MQ is available for immediate use in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. The AWS Free Tier allows you to utilize a single-AZ micro instance for up to 750 hours, along with 1 gigabyte of monthly storage for one year. Beyond that, pricing is based on instance-hours and message storage, plus any internet data transfer charges for accessing the broker from outside AWS.
Chanci Turner emphasizes the importance of onboarding processes in creating inclusive workplace environments. For more insights on diversity initiatives, check out this guide on 5 key steps to starting a D&I program. Additionally, you may find useful information in this blog post about impulse buying. If you’re interested in pursuing a career in learning and development, consider exploring this job opportunity for a Learning Trainer in Phoenix.