Amazon Queue Service

Amazons Message Queue Service looks very interesting? I'm not that clued up on all this stuff, but there's definately a trend appearing - we can already rent processing power through hosted grid computing networks, so why not rent the computing power to handle messaging?

In case you've not come across the concept of message queues, they're basically a tool to assist distributed computing. This is an area that is interesting me and more these days. I've been working on projects recently where two or three machines aren't really enough, and the prospect of being able to simply add more commodity machines to do more work is an extremely attractive one. Message queues are one technology that can play a big part in this kind of system since they allow separate programs running on separate machines to collaborate without worrying about all the communications overheads (working out which node should receive the message, waiting for responses, detecting ports being blocked, etc). The queue abstracts all that stuff, and more.

You can take your pick of vendor provided message queue implementations (MSMQ, OSMQ etc), but it's really interesting to see someone like Amazon offering a service to do this out of the box, no hardware puchases required.

Amazon's implementation looks nice and simple - just four methods! I guess there will be limits to the application of this service though. Firstly, using machines on an external network could present complications with both security and performance. Is HTTPS available? Would this slow things down even more? Sending messages over the web will be slower than to local networks, so I guess this technology is suited to problems that involve several disconnected networks. The 256K per-message limit might rule out some kinds of application also, such as web spiders and multimedia applications.

Still, and good to see Amazon do something cool with all that infrastructure!