SQS as an event source to Lambda is a game changer. I can now send all my event-based messages, logs, and analytics from my iOS application directly to an SQS queue. Sending these messages to SQS hasn’t changed; SQS is still low latency and batch capable, has very high throughput, and is an affordable alternative to using other storage options and no data store schema or tables to setup. What has changed is the managed backend resources for consuming content sent to the queue. All the “consuming of an SQS queue” is managed for you and we’ll explore what role each service is playing as part of this new architecture.
In this article, I’ll go over the details of SQS as an event source, the Lambda integration, and then we’ll quickly build this architecture using pre-built AWS CloudFormation templates to provision the backend resources. After you are up and running, follow along for a deeper dive into this serverless event-driven architecture.