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Thoughts On Exactly-Once Processing And First-In First-Out

Kevin Sookocheff looks into Amazon’s Simple Queue Service and explains some concepts of distributed messaging systems in the process:

In an ideal scenario, the five minute window would be a complete non-issue. Unfortunately, if you are relying on SQS’s exactly-once guarantee for critical use cases you will need to account for the possibility of this error and design your application accordingly.

On the message consumer side, FIFO queues do not guarantee exactly once delivery, because in simple fact, exactly once delivery at the transport level is provably impossible. Even if you could ensure exactly-once delivery at the transport level, it probably isn’t what you want anyways — if a subscriber receives a message from the transport, there is still a chance that it can crash before processing it, in which case you definitely want the messaging system to deliver the message again.

Instead, FIFO queues offer exactly-once processing by guaranteeing that once a message has successfully been acknowledged as processed that it won’t be delivered again. To understand more completely how this works, let’s walk through the details of how you go about consuming messages from SQS.

It’s a great read, so check it out.