AWS Application Services: Lambda, SES, SNS, SQS, SWF

In this post, I have covered the overview of AWS Application Services, Amazon SES, SNS, SQS, AWS Lambda, and many other things. So let’s get started.

Gone are the days when businesses had to build and maintain infrastructures to run any on-premises application. Now there has been a sudden shift in technology. Using the Software as a Service model, businesses and organizations can consume online hosted applications that lower prices and improve efficiency. In this post, we will cover various AWS Application services that coordinate between your distributed applications.

Simple Email Service 

Simple Email Service (SES) is a flexible, highly scalable, and cost-effective service that allows application developers to send emails from within the application. There are straightforward steps to configure SES service quickly. We can use it for transactional emails, marketing emails, and sending emails in bulk. It also provides flexible IP deployment and email authentication options that help achieve higher deliverability and protect the sender’s reputation. Sending emails via SES is highly secure and reliable. It has featured customers like Netflix, Reddit, Duolingo, and many others.

Advantages of Simple Email Service

Now we will see the benefits of one of the AWS Application Services, i.e., SES.

• You can quickly and securely scale Amazon Simple Email Services. It comes up with different options such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) that confirm your right to send on behalf of your domain.
• It helps in optimizing your deliverability. There is a reputation dashboard available that includes anti-spam feedback, account performance insights to boost your deliverability. It offers flexible deployment options such as shared, dedicated, and customer-owned IPs.
• It shows email sending statistics, email deliveries, bounces, and feedback loop results, so it helps measure the effectiveness of every outreached email.
• It also supports email receiving that enables you to interact with customers at a larger scale, and you pay only for what you use.

Use Cases

Let’s discuss the use cases now.

• You can use it for Transactional Emails such as purchase confirmation or password resets etc.
• You can also use the Amazon SES service for marketing purposes such as sending special offers, newsletters, etc.
• You can send bulk emails to such as notifications and announcements to large organizations or communities.

Simple Notification Service

Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed service offered by Amazon. It is helpful for application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication. Its A2A functionality offers high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging between microservices, event-driven serverless applications, and distributed systems. It also provides Amazon SNS topics. Using SNS topics, publisher systems can fan out messages to many subscriber systems such as AWS Lambda function and Amazon SQS queues for parallel processing.

Advantages of Amazon Simple Notification Service

Amazon SNS is the essential component of Application services in AWS. So, it becomes important to know about the benefits this service offers to us.

• It helps modernize and decouple your applications into various smaller and independent components. This process helps to develop, deploy and maintain applications easily. Its event-driven architecture lets your application scale independently, improves performance and reliability.
• You can send messages directly to millions of users in over 200 countries in the form of the mobile push for Apple, Android, and other platforms or Emails. It uses a single endpoint to push mobile notifications to all platforms.
• Amazon SNS comes up with many strategies that provide message durability. It stores the published messages across multiple geographically- separated data centers and then deliver them.
• Amazon SNS is a fully managed service that takes care of heavy loads related to capacity planning, provisioning, monitoring, and scales accordingly.
• It also ensures accuracy with message ordering and deduplication that helps maintain consistency.
• It simplifies messaging architecture by offloading the message filtering logic from subscriber’s systems and message routing logic from publisher’s systems.

Use Cases

Let’s have a look at the use cases now.

• It is highly used for event notifications, monitoring various applications, time-sensitive information updates, workflow systems, etc.
• It can also be used in workflow systems to relay events among various distributed computing applications.
• It helps developers build applications that are based on real-time events.

Also Check: Our blog post on AWS Secrets Manager.

Simple Queue Service

Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed service offering from Amazon. It helps to decouple and scale microservices, serverless applications, and distributed systems. It removes the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message-oriented middleware. It offers developers to try new ideas and make a difference in their work. SQL lets you send, store and receive messages of any volume. It is a simple process to start with an SQS service on an AWS console or command-line interface.

There are two types of message queues present in SQS.

• Standard Queue: It offers maximum throughput, proper ordering, and at-least-once delivery approach.
• SQS FIFO Queue: It is designed so that messages are processed exactly once in the same order they are sent.

Advantages of Simple Queue Service

Now we will discuss how Simple Queue Service is benefiting us.

• To provide better scalability and high availability, AWS takes care of all ongoing operations and underlying infrastructure needs. SQS is a cost-effective method, and there is no need to acquire, install, and configure messaging software.
• There is no need to worry about your sensitive data because SQS uses Server Side Encryption to encrypt the body of the message.
• Amazon SQS can transmit any amount of data at any level of throughput without losing messages.
• It can scale dynamically up and down based on requirements, and there is no limit constraint on the number of messages.

Use Cases

Let’s see in what way we can make use of Amazon SQS.

• SQS is a great choice to determine the load on the application, and it can scale up and down as per the load.
• The combination of both SQS and SNS helps to send identical copies of a message to multiple queues.
• It helps to move slow operations from interactive request paths by enqueueing the request.
• Buffer and batch operations in SQS help add reliability and scalability to the architecture and handles temporary volume spikes without losing messages.

Simple Workflow Service

Amazon Simple Workflow Service is specially designed for developers. It helps to build run and scale background jobs that have sequential or parallel steps. It is a fully managed service from Amazon that acts as a state tracker and task coordinator in cloud computing.

If your application steps take more than 500 milliseconds to complete, you need to track your state of processing and then try to recover or retry. If there is a task failure, you can take the help of Amazon AWF.

Advantages of Simple Workflow Service

Let’s see the benefits of Amazon SWF that is one of the core AWS Application services.

• It provides a logical separation between the control flow of your background job’s stepwise logic and the units of work in actuality with unique business logic. This way, it enables users to manage, scale separately, and maintain the state machinery of your application from the core business logic.
• Amazon SWF runs on high-availability data centers developed by Amazon; therefore, the state tracking and task processing engines are available 24*7.
• Amazon SWF also helps replace the complexity of process automation software and custom-coded workflow solutions with Amazon’s fully managed cloud workflow web service.
• It offers smooth, flexible scaling as per the requirement and lets users code their application components and coordination logic in any programming language.

Use Cases

Give a look at the use cases.

• It offers a video encoding feature using Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.  Videos of large size are uploaded in Amazon S3 in chunks. After when the chunk is successfully uploaded, it is encoded by downloading it into the Amazon EC2 instance. Now, the encoded chunk is stored in another location of Amazon S3. After completing all the chunks, a complete encoded file is created and stored back in Amazon S3.
• It is useful in migrating components from datacenters to cloud platforms. Many business-critical operations are moved without disruptions and hosted in private data centers.
• It helps to process large product catalogs using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The first step is to validate large catalogs and then process these catalogs in batches.

Check out: AWS Storage overview

AWS Lambda Service

AWS Lambda is serverless compute service offered by Amazon. Using this service, you can directly run your code without provisioning or managing any server type, managing runtimes, or creating workload-aware cluster scaling logic. You can upload your code in the form of a Zip file or container image. AWS Lambda automatically allocates the compute execution power and runs your code per the incoming event or request. You can code in such a way that it can automatically trigger 200 AWS services and SaaS applications. Even you can code the Lambda function in the language you are comfortable in.

Advantages of AWS Lambda

Let’s have a look at the advantages.

• There is no server requirement as AWS Lambda automatically runs your code without any need for provisioning or managing infrastructure.
• AWS Lamda runs code in response to each event that helps to scale the application as per the requirement.
• It is a cost-optimized solution as you only need to pay for the compute time you consume.
• AWS Lambda optimizes your code execution time by making the right memory size choices for your function.

Use Cases

Let’s see the use cases of AWS Lambda.

• AWS Lambda is very useful to execute code in response to various triggers like shifts in system state, changes in data, or actions by users.
• Users can also build serverless backends using AWS Lambda to handle 3rd party API requests, mobile and web, etc.
• Developers can build powerful and optimized applications by integrating AWS Lambda with other AWS services.
• It supports Real-time file processing.
• It also supports real-time streaming data processing.

Also Check: Our blog post on AWS WAF.

FAQs

Q1: What are the application services in AWS?

Ans: AWS provides a variety of services to build, deploy, and run an application successfully.

• Simple Email Service (SES)
• Simple Notification Service (SNS)
• Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• Simple Workflow Service (SWF)
• AWS Lambda Service

Q2: What is AWS Application?

Ans: AWS offers various features and on-demand access to scalable web and application servers, databases, storage, content delivery that helps to build and run powerful applications to greater customer experience.

Q3: How many applications does AWS have?

Ans: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is leading the cloud market. It is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform that offers more than 200 fully managed services across data centers globally.

Q4: Is AWS a hosting service?

Ans: AWS is a virtual web hosting service adopted by a number of organizations. Amazon launched AWS Hosting Service in 2002. It offers a cloud-based approach to hosting. It is cost-effective and highly user-friendly.

Q5: What is the difference between EC2 and lambda?

Ans: AWS Lambda offers a Serverless Architecture that allows running a block of code one the event is triggered. AWS EC2 is a service that offers to run Virtual Machines, configure environments and run custom applications.

Q6: What can trigger lambda in AWS?

Ans: AWS Lambda can be triggered through AWS services like Kinesis, SNS, CloudWatch, DynamoDB, etc. It can also establish a connection between existing EFS file systems into workflows by AWS Step Functions.

Conclusion

AWS Application Services is a bundle of ready-to-run services to build robust applications. No matter if you are an application vendor or an enterprise that wants to deploy your existing on-premises projects on the cloud, you can blindly go with AWS Application Services. You can use this brilliant technical enhancement that provides seamless and painless upgrades in functionality.