3 Things

Amazon Simple Queue Service or Amazon SQS is a distributed message queuing service that enables developers to build loosely coupled solutions. Often valued for its ease of use, Amazon SQS queues can be spun up in a matter of seconds from the AWS console, SDK or the CLI. Still, there are subtleties that developers should be aware of when developing solutions with Amazon SQS.

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Encryption

Messages stored in an Amazon SQS queue is data at rest. And, we can protect that data by encrypting it with KMS keys, just like we would if we were going to protect data in an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon SNS topic. With Amazon SQS Server-side encryption, messages are encrypted when they are received by SQS and are decrypted when delivered to a message consumer that is authorized for the SQS message queue and the KMS key.

There’s a lot that goes into cryptographic key management – creation, rotation, expiry, replacement, revocation, etc. AWS Key Management Service performs all of the aforementioned operations, but also seamlessly integrates with many AWS services, like, S3, SNS, SQS, et. al. Simply put, key management is hard and AWS Key Management Service can greatly simplify your cryptography story.

As much as AWS KMS can simplify cryptographic key management for your organization, there are some gotchas that you should be aware of when developing solutions using AWS Key Management Service.

Amazon Simple Notification Service, AKA SNS, is a versatile pub/sub AWS service that supports several different endpoints including, SMS, email and HTTP/HTTPS. Amazon SNS also supports AWS services as endpoints, like Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda and AWS Kenesis Data Firehouse. Amazon Simple Notification Service, which is often leveraged to do the heavy lifting in a fan-out pattern, provides a simplified path for creating pub/sub based applications without having to set up tons of infrastructure. Even with this simplified path, there are a few things that every developer should know before they start their Amazon SNS journey.