Can I use Amazon SQS as a delay queue before sending to SNS?

Question

My system run on an Amazon autoscaling group and one feature allows user to user messaging and I have the following use case to resolve.

1. A new message is sent in my application between users.
2. A message to notify the the user by e-mail is dropped into a queue with a 60 second delay. This delay allows time for a realtime chat client (faye/angularjs) to see the message and mark it as viewed.
3. After the delay the message is picked up, the "read" status is checked and if it has not been read by the client an e-mail is dispatched.

Originally I was going to use a cronjob on each application server poll the message queue however it occurs to me it would be more efficient to use SNS to call some kind of e-mail sending endpoint (perhaps in Lambda).

I can't see any way to have SNS poll SQS however, can anybody suggest how this could be done? Essentially I want SNS with a delay so that I don't spam somebody in a "live" chat with e-mail alerts.

Thanks

Answer 1

Unfortunately this is not yet available out of the box. The missing part is the generation of Amazon SNS notifications on message arrival/visibility by an Amazon SQS queue, be it via push (similar to Amazon S3 notifications, or via poll similar to Amazon Kinesis subscriptions (see The Pull/Push Event Models for more on the difference), which would both allow to directly connect an AWS Lambda function to the resp. SQS delay queue events, see e.g.:

• Lambda with SQS

That being said, you can work around this limitations in a few ways, for example:

• trigger your Lambda function on schedule (e.g. once per minute), and poll your SQS delay queue from there
  • scheduled Lambda functions are an eagerly awaited missing Lambda feature in turn, but it is more easily worked around, be it either by a cron job of yours, or Eric Hammond's Unreliable Town Clock (UTC) for example

The AWS Lambda team has delivered many/most similar feature requests over recent month' btw., so I would expect them to offer both SQS event handling and scheduled Lambda functions over the course of the year still.