Learning/AWS SQS/Glossary
outline
This chapter is an outline. The curriculum, learning objectives and structure are settled; the prose, diagrams and code are still being written. What is below is the plan for the chapter, not the chapter.

Glossary

Every term is defined once, in its owning module, and linked from everywhere else. This page is the index of those definitions.

Definition format (from _reference/chapter-template.md):

TermSimple: one sentence a beginner understands. Technical: the precise behaviour. Example: a concrete instance.

Core vocabulary

TermDefined in
Message01 — Messaging Fundamentals
Queue01
Producer01
Consumer01
Polling01
Acknowledgement01
Decoupling (temporal / spatial / failure)01, 24
Load levelling01
Backpressure01, 14
Push vs pull delivery01

AWS and SQS identifiers

TermDefined in
Region00 — Prerequisites
ARN00
IAM00
Credential provider chain00
Managed service / shared responsibility model00
Amazon SQS02 — Introduction to SQS
Queue URL02
Queue ARN02
MessageId04 — Sending and Receiving
ReceiptHandle04
Message attributes04
System attributes04
ApproximateReceiveCount04

API actions

TermDefined in
SendMessage / SendMessageBatch04, 13
ReceiveMessage04
DeleteMessage / DeleteMessageBatch04, 13
ChangeMessageVisibility08
GetQueueAttributes04
StartMessageMoveTask (DLQ redrive)11
PurgeQueue26

Queue mechanics

TermDefined in
Distributed storage03 — How SQS Actually Works
Approximate metrics03
Competing consumers03, 14
Available / In-flight / Delayed message05 — The Message Lifecycle
Message retention period05
DelaySeconds / message timer05
Visibility timeout08
Heartbeat extension08
Standard queue06
Best-effort ordering06
Duplicate delivery06
Fair queues06
FIFO queue07
MessageGroupId07
MessageDeduplicationId07
Content-based deduplication07
Deduplication interval07
Head-of-line blocking07
Partition (FIFO)07
High throughput mode07

Delivery, retry and failure

TermDefined in
At-most-once / at-least-once / exactly-once09 — Delivery Semantics
Idempotency / idempotency key09
Transaction boundary09
Transient vs permanent error10 — Retries
Poison message10
Exponential backoff10
Jitter10
Retry storm10
Circuit breaker10
Dead-letter queue (DLQ)11
Redrive policy / maxReceiveCount11
Redrive allow policy11

Efficiency and scale

TermDefined in
Short polling12 — Long Polling
Long polling / WaitTimeSeconds12
NumberOfEmptyReceives12, 17
Batch13
MaxNumberOfMessages13
Partial batch failure13, 19
Worker / worker pool13, 14
Backlog per instance14
Target tracking14
Graceful shutdown14, 22
Little's Law15
Arrival rate / service rate15
Queue depth / drain time15
Utilisation / cycle time15

Security

TermDefined in
Identity-based policy16 — Security
Resource-based policy / queue policy16
SSE-SQS / SSE-KMS16
Confused deputy16
VPC endpoint / PrivateLink16

Monitoring

TermDefined in
ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible06, 17
ApproximateNumberOfMessagesNotVisible06, 17
ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage17
Correlation ID17
Structured logging17
Composite alarm17
Redelivery rate17
Metric signature26

Integrations

TermDefined in
Lambda event source mapping (ESM)19
ReportBatchItemFailures19
MaximumBatchingWindowInSeconds19
Provisioned mode19
SNS / topic / subscription20
Fanout20
Filter policy20
Raw message delivery20
S3 event notification21
EventBridge rule / event pattern21
waitForTaskToken21
KEDA22
IRSA22
Spring Cloud AWS / @SqsListener / SqsTemplate23
Acknowledgement mode23

Architecture and distributed systems

TermDefined in
Eventual consistency24
Dual-write problem24
Outbox pattern24
Saga / compensating transaction24
CQRS24
Bulkhead24
Fault isolation / graceful degradation24
Event vs command24
Claim-check pattern25
Priority lanes25
Staged pipeline25
RPO / RTO25
Topic / partition / offset / consumer group (Kafka)27
Exchange / binding / prefetch / DLX (RabbitMQ)27
Destructive consumption27

Index: Course home