Enhancing Message Delivery: Amazon SNS Standard Topics Now Support Amazon SQS Fair Queues
Seattle, WA – July 31, 2025 – Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce a significant enhancement to Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) standard topics, bringing the power of Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) fair queues to a broader range of messaging scenarios. Effective today, customers can now leverage SQS fair queues with their SNS standard topics, providing a more equitable and predictable message consumption experience for their subscribers.
This update addresses a common challenge in distributed systems: ensuring that all subscribers to an SNS topic receive messages in a timely and fair manner, even when dealing with varying processing capacities or potential backlogs among those subscribers. Previously, while SNS provided robust message fan-out capabilities, the distribution of messages to SQS queues subscribed to standard topics could, in certain high-throughput or uneven load situations, lead to situations where some subscribers experienced delays if others were unable to process messages as quickly.
What are SQS Fair Queues and Why Do They Matter for SNS?
SQS fair queues, a feature of Amazon SQS, are designed to distribute messages evenly across multiple concurrent consumers. When a message is available in a queue configured with fair queues, SQS attempts to deliver it to a consumer that has received fewer messages recently. This helps prevent a scenario where a few highly responsive consumers “hog” all the messages, leaving slower consumers in a perpetual backlog.
By integrating SQS fair queues with SNS standard topics, AWS is extending this fairness principle to the SNS fan-out pattern. When an SNS standard topic publishes a message, and that message is routed to multiple SQS queues subscribed to that topic, the SQS fair queues mechanism will now actively manage the delivery of those messages to the respective SQS consumers.
Key Benefits of this Integration:
- Improved Fairness for Subscribers: This is the most significant advantage. Customers with multiple SQS subscribers to an SNS topic can now be assured that messages are distributed more evenly, preventing situations where a few subscribers consistently get ahead while others lag behind. This is particularly beneficial for architectures where subscriber processing speeds can vary.
- Enhanced Message Consumption Predictability: By promoting a more balanced message distribution, this feature contributes to a more predictable consumption pattern across all your SQS subscribers. This can simplify capacity planning and improve the overall responsiveness of your application.
- Reduced Latency for Slower Subscribers: Subscribers with lower processing throughput will experience reduced message latency as they are less likely to be starved of messages by faster consumers. This can lead to a more consistent user experience for downstream services or applications.
- Simplified System Design: Developers can now rely on this integrated solution to manage message fairness without needing to implement custom logic within their applications to balance message consumption across multiple SQS queues. This streamlines architectural design and reduces operational overhead.
- No Additional Cost: This enhanced functionality is available for Amazon SNS standard topics and Amazon SQS fair queues without incurring any additional charges.
How to Enable SQS Fair Queues for Your SNS Subscriptions:
Enabling this feature is straightforward. When you create or update an SQS queue to be a subscriber to an SNS standard topic, you can now configure the SQS queue to use fair queues. This is typically done within the SQS console or via the AWS SDKs and CLI when defining your queue’s receive message behavior. Ensure that the SQS queue policy grants SNS the necessary permissions to send messages to the queue.
Use Cases:
This enhancement is valuable for a wide range of use cases, including:
- Event-driven architectures: Distributing events to multiple microservices, where some services might have varying processing capabilities.
- Fan-out notifications: Sending notifications to multiple downstream systems, ensuring all systems receive a fair share of updates.
- Order processing: Broadcasting order updates to different fulfillment or inventory management systems.
- Data synchronization: Propagating data changes to multiple databases or caches.
AWS is committed to continuously improving its services to meet the evolving needs of its customers. The introduction of SQS fair queues for SNS standard topics is a testament to this commitment, offering a more robust and equitable messaging experience for distributed applications. We encourage customers to explore this new capability and experience the benefits of fairer message distribution in their architectures.
Amazon SNS standard topics now support Amazon SQS fair queues
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