So now let’s talk about Amazon MQ.
So we know about SQS and SNS and they’re cloud-native services because they are proprietary protocols from AWS.
They use their own sets of APIs. But if you are running traditional application on-premises, you may use open protocols such as MQTT, AMQP, STOMP, Openwire, WSS.
And when you’re migrating your application to the cloud, you may not want to re-engineer your application to use the SQS and the SNS protocols or APIs. So instead, you wanna use the traditional protocols you used to, such as MQTT, AMQP, and so on. So for this, we can use Amazon MQ.
So Amazon MQ is very simple.
It’s a managed message broker service for two technologies, for RabbitMQ and for ActiveMQ. So RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ are, for example, on-premises technologies that provide you access to the open protocols I just mentioned. So then we can get a managed version of these brokers onto the cloud thanks to Amazon MQ. So as such, you can understand the implications.
First of all, Amazon MQ doesn’t scale as much as SQS or SNS, which have sort of like infinite scaling.
And because Amazon MQ runs on servers, you may have server issues. And so you can run multi-AZ setup with a failover if you want to be highly available.
Also, Amazon MQ comes with both a queue feature, so it looks like SQS, and topic features, it looks like SNS as part of a single broker.
High Availability
Now, how does the high availability work for Amazon MQ?
Well, for example, let’s say we have a region us-east-1 and we have two availability zones, us-east-1a and us-east-1b. One zone is going to be active and the other one is going to be a standby. So we’re going to have an Amazon MQ broker in both AZ, okay, where one is active and one is standby.
And so for the failover to work, you need to define Amazon EFS as your backend storage. And we’ve seen that EFS is a network file system which can be mounted onto multiple availability zones.
So what happens is that whenever you have failover happening, well, the standby is going to be also mounted onto Amazon EFS, and therefore will have the same data as your first active queue and therefore the failover can happen correctly.
So if your client talks to the Amazon MQ broker, okay, and there is a failover happening, then the data will be kept safe thanks to Amazon EFS.
