Event-driven architecture with Amazon SQS and AWS Lambda
The centerpiece of event-driven architecture is a queue — made easier now that Amazon SQS can trigger AWS Lambda functions
For those that follow some of my prior posts, you probably know that I am a huge fan of event-driven patterns. Instead of waiting and polling for changes, actions happen when changes in the system occur.
We have talked about this architectural pattern for years — but until recently, it was more of a theoretical idea rather than a simple-to-implement pattern.
However, AWS Lambda brought event-driven compute to everyone and took the event-driven paradigm to a whole new level. Companies like Netflix (Bless) and Capital One (Cloud Custodian) are now using event-driven architectures to perform real-time security, compliance and policies management.
The centerpiece of event-driven architectures is often a queue. On AWS, that central building block is taken care of by Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). In order to read information from an SQS queue, your lambda function had to poll for it — until now!
