What are the possible use cases for Amazon SQS or any Queue Service?

Question

So I have been trying to get my hands on Amazon's AWS since my company's whole infrastructure is based of it.

One component I have never been able to understand properly is the Queue Service, I have searched Google quite a bit but I haven't been able to get a satisfactory answer. I think a Cron job and Queue Service are quite similar somewhat, correct me if I am wrong.

So what exactly SQS does? As far as I understand, it stores simple messages to be used by other components in AWS to do tasks & you can send messages to do that.

In this question, Can someone explain to me what Amazon Web Services components are used in a normal web service?; the answer mentioned they used SQS to queue tasks they want performed asynchronously. Why not just give a message back to the user & do the processing later on? Why wait for SQS to do its stuff?

Also, let's just say I have a web app which allows user to schedule some daily tasks, how would SQS would fit in that?

Answer 1

No, cron and SQS are not similar. One (cron) schedules jobs while the other (SQS) stores messages. Queues are used to decouple message producers from message consumers. This is one way to architect for scale and reliability.

Let's say you've built a mobile voting app for a popular TV show and 5 to 25 million viewers are all voting at the same time (at the end of each performance). How are you going to handle that many votes in such a short space of time (say, 15 seconds)? You could build a significant web server tier and database back-end that could handle millions of messages per second but that would be expensive, you'd have to pre-provision for maximum expected workload, and it would not be resilient (for example to database failure or throttling). If few people voted then you're overpaying for infrastructure; if voting went crazy then votes could be lost.

A better solution would use some queuing mechanism that decoupled the voting apps from your service where the vote queue was highly scalable so it could happily absorb 10 messages/sec or 10 million messages/sec. Then you would have an application tier pulling messages from that queue as fast as possible to tally the votes.