Is there an elegant way to post messages to AWS SQS with visibility delay of longer than 15 minutes?

Question

In Amazon Web Services, their queues allow you to post messages with a visibility delay up to 15 minutes. What if I don't want messages visible for 6 months?

I'm trying to come up with an elegant solution to the poll/push problem. I can write code to poll the SQS (or a database) every few seconds, check for messages that are ready to be visible, then move them to a "visible queue", or something like that. I wish there was a simpler, more reliable method to have messages become visible in queues far into the future without me having to worry about my polling application working perfectly all the time.

I'm not married to AWS, SQS or any of that, but I'd prefer to find a cloud-friendly solution that is stable, reliable and will trigger an event far into the future without me having to worry about checking on its status every day.

Any thoughts or alternate trees for me to explore barking up are welcome.

Thanks!

Answer 1

It sounds like you might be misunderstanding the visibility delay. Its purpose is to make sure that the polling application doesn't pull the same item off the queue more than once.

In other words, when the item is pulled off the queue it becomes invisible for a predetermined period of time (default is 30 seconds, max is 15 minutes) in case the polling system has a cluster of machines reading from the queue all at once.

Here's the relevant documentation:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/IntroductionArticle.html#AboutVT

...and the sentence in particular that relates to my comment is:

"Immediately after the component receives the message, the message is still in the queue. However, you don't want other components in the system receiving and processing the message again. Therefore, Amazon SQS blocks them with a visibility timeout, which is a period of time during which Amazon SQS prevents other consuming components from receiving and processing that message."

You should be able to use SQS for your purpose since you can leave an item in the queue for as long as you want.