At a high level, SQS is simple, but there are a lot of additions AWS has made over time such as dead letter queues, message attributes, delayed messages. Some

At a high level, SQS is simple, but there are a lot of additions AWS has made over time such as dead letter queues, message attributes, delayed messages. Some of these settings are per-queue level, some are overridable on a per-message basis. Not that AMQP isn't super complex, but SQS has a larger feature set surface area than a lot of people realize. There is also a bit of oddness experienced when people try to use the various AWS libraries to hit non-AWS hosted endpoints since the happy path for these is to connect to AWS regions. I worked on an internal SQS clone in the past (not related to current employer). From a queue API perspective, I like iron.io's MQ API [0] and Google Cloud PubSub[1]. Disclaimer: I currently work for Nest, an Alphabet company [0] http://dev.iron.io/mq/3/ http://dev.iron.io/mq/3/ [1] https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/reference/rest/ https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/reference/rest/