Summary and Quiz

In this chapter, we explored the different services provided by Amazon that allow us to integrate the different components of our application. This includes services that can be used to transfer messages or data between application components, such as Amazon SNS and SQS, or services that allow us to orchestrate or connect application components, such as AWS Step Functions and EventBridge.

Let’s quickly summarise what we learned in this chapter, and then we’ll take a short quiz to test our knowledge.

Summary

Here’s a summary of the most important key takeaways from this chapter:

Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS is a message queuing service that stores messages sent from a producer and sends them to consumers using a polling model. It uses the redundant infrastructure to store multiple copies of our messages across various AZs, making SQS queues highly available and durable.

Following are the key points related to Amazon SQS:

• In FIFO queues, the order of the messages sent is retained.

• Consumers can poll messages using short or long polling, In short polling, a subset of SQS queue servers is queried and an empty response is sent immediately if no messages are found. In long polling, SQS waits for at least one message till the request times out.

• Once a consumer fetches a message from a queue, its visibility timeout period starts, during which the message is not visible to other consumers. A consumer must process and delete this message from the queue to ensure this message is not re-processed.

Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS is a message delivery service that uses the publish-subscribe model to broadcast messages from a publisher to its subscribers. SNS allows us to create standard and FIFO topics. The order of the messages is retained in FIFO topics. SNS supports various endpoints and we can create filter policies to ensure certain messages are sent to certain subscribers.

Amazon MQ

Amazon MQ is a message broker service that enables communication between application components. It currently supports Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ brokers. We can integrate this service with our existing applications eradicating the need of creating, managing, and operating our own messaging system.

Amazon AppFlow

Amazon AppFlow is an integration service that allows us to easily transfer data between SaaS applications and AWS services. Triggers are created in AppFlow that determine how and when data is transferred between two services.

AWS EventBridge

In Amazon EventBridge, events are generated when a change is detected in the AWS environment. We can create rules based on these events to connect the different components of our application.

AWS Step Functions

AWS Step Functions is an orchestration service that creates workflows to connect the different components of our application. In AWS Step Functions, there are different stages, such as pass, fail, wait, etc that help our state machine to make decisions based on the input it receives.

Test your knowledge

Take a short quiz to validate your knowledge about Application Integration services in Amazon and to make sure you haven't missed out on anything: