Azure Service Bus equivalent for AWS

Question

I am in the process of moving an application from c# to node.js. I am a node.js newbie, coming from a .net background. I am looking to incorporate domain driven design patterns into the app. development which led me to the concept of bounded contexts and micro services. I would like to use aws as my cloud provider but am having a problem in determining which tool I should use for handlling command and event processing? Azure has the service bus which seems to work pretty good for this.

Is there an equivalent to the service bus for aws or should I just look to use SQS?

Answer 1

There is no direct equivalent to Azure Service Bus, but it can be replaced by combining SQS and SNS. Let's take a look. Azure Service Bus consists of two parts:

1. Queues. In most cases, SQS (Simple Queue Service) will provide an adequate replacement, but keep in mind that Azure Service Bus queues are First In-First Out (FIFO), while SQS queues do not guarantee the order of messages.

Update 2018-01-09: SQS now allows to create FIFO queues. (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/FIFO-queues.html)

2. Topics and subscriptions. This is used in PubSub (publish/subscribe) event-driven design, when you need to deliver the same message to several consumers. SQS can't do that, but SNS (Simple Notification Service) is exactly that type of service.

Update 2018-08-01: on November 28th 2017 Amazon introduced Amazon MQ, which is Apache Active MQ in Amazon cloud. Amazon MQ has both queues and topics (for publish/subscribe usage model), so it can be seen as a full-featured replacement for Azure Service Bus.

Answer 2

July 2019 Update: Amazon introduced EventBridge service bus service that enables event-driven architectures for custom applications, as well as integration with AWS services and other SaaS hosted on its platform, see https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/07/introducing-amazon-eventbridge/