Introduction

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that makes it easy to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message-oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work.

In this article, we will discuss how to use message filtering with AWS SQS. We will look at the different types of message filtering available, how to set up message filtering, and how to use message filtering to improve the performance of your applications.

What is Message Filtering?

Message filtering is a feature of SQS that allows you to filter messages based on specific criteria. This allows you to only receive messages that meet certain criteria, such as messages that contain a specific keyword or messages that are sent from a specific source.

Message filtering can be used to improve the performance of your applications by reducing the number of messages that need to be processed. It can also be used to ensure that only messages that meet certain criteria are processed.

Types of Message Filtering

SQS supports two types of message filtering:

• String matching: This type of message filtering allows you to filter messages based on a specific string. For example, you can filter messages that contain a specific keyword or messages that are sent from a specific source.

• Attribute-based filtering: This type of message filtering allows you to filter messages based on specific attributes. For example, you can filter messages based on the message ID, the message timestamp, or the message size.

Setting Up Message Filtering

Setting up message filtering is easy. All you need to do is specify the filter policy when you create the queue. The filter policy is a JSON document that contains the criteria for filtering messages.

For example, if you wanted to filter messages that contain the keyword “foo”, you would specify the following filter policy:

{
  "filter": {
    "string": {
      "contains": "foo"
    }
  }
}

Using Message Filtering

Once you have set up message filtering, you can use it to filter messages as they are sent to the queue. When a message is sent to the queue, SQS will check the filter policy to see if the message meets the criteria. If the message meets the criteria, it will be added to the queue. If the message does not meet the criteria, it will be discarded.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed how to use message filtering with AWS SQS. We looked at the different types of message filtering available, how to set up message filtering, and how to use message filtering to improve the performance of your applications. Message filtering is a powerful feature of SQS that can be used to ensure that only messages that meet certain criteria are processed.