AWS Application Integration Services

This week we look at a shorter list of services in the Application integration group.  The list may be short, but these are highly useful and valuable services for application developers.  These are excellent ways to integrate your applications (as you would expect from the name). AWS Step Functions

Coordinate Distributed Applications

The Step Functions free tier includes 4,000 free state transitions per month. All charges are metered daily and billed monthly.  This service provides a way for you to visually connect pieces of your application when the pieces are serverless or otherwise stand-alone functions.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Managed Message Queues

Simple Queue service is a bundled solution.  It runs on a server and uses storage for the queue.   Thus, the two pieces combine for the pricing and utilization.  You can get started with Amazon SQS for free.  Accordingly, all customers can make 1 million Amazon SQS requests for free each month. Some applications might be able to operate within this Free Tier limit.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Managed Message Topics for Pub/Sub

There is a free tier that covers your first million push notifications (publishes and deliveries) every month.  The notification service is similar to a queue.  However, instead of a push and pop approach, it is a subscribe/publish model.  In general, your application subscribes to a topic.  Then, when a message appears on the queue, the application receives it and can process accordingly.

Amazon MQ

Managed Message Broker for ActiveMQ

The Amazon Message broker Free Tier includes up to 750 hours of a single-instance mq.t2.micro broker per month.  The storage starts at up to 1GB of storage per month for one year on the free tier.  All new AWS accounts are eligible to receive the 12 months of AWS Free Tier access.  As always, you can check out the AWS Free Tier page for details.