Amazon's SQS service
Categories
Wow. I've only just realised how impressive Amazon's web services are. I've always liked their Simple Storage Service (S3), but well, that's just data storage - it's not terribly exciting (although I keep meaning to look into the opportunities for backup-to-the-cloud).
Today I stumbled across their hosted message queue service. This is all a bit more, well, enterprise-y. It's a B2B type solution, and normally, if you needed a message queue in your enterprise architecture, you'd host it yourself. Now you don't have to. Instead, you can pay Amazon to do it - per message, per amount of data in and per amount of data out.
And on top of this, Amazon have released a WCF transport for it, making it nice and easy to use from your favourite Microsoft messaging library. (Although looking at it, it's a community sample, albeit one provided by the Amazon team - the download is hosted on Microsoft's .net 3 sandbox site.)
Microsoft have recently dipped their toes in this area, too, with the release of a CTP version of their BizTalk Services (of course, Amazon's queue is already released). Microsoft's offering is perhaps broader in scope (as always), including identity federation (via the marvelous CardSpace) and a service relay, which is, at a squint, the closest match to Amazon's queue, although it's most definitely not a queue. It looks like Workflow hosting will come soon, too, which will be one to watch.
These are interesting moves, pulling key enterprise architecture out to hosted providers. I wonder where this will go, and who will use it? And I wonder if the people who do use these types of queues will still have queues at their end of the wire?