The use-cases solved by Amazon SQS & it’s case study

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you 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. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available.

SQS offers two types of message queues. Standard queues offer maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery. SQS FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent.

Use-case that helped out NASA by using Amazon Services

The NASA Image and Video Library provides easy access to more than 140,000 still images, audio recordings, and videos—documenting NASA’s more than half a century of achievements in exploring the vast unknown. The architecture includes Amazon SQS to decouple incoming jobs from pipeline processes and Amazon Simple Notification Service to trigger the processing pipeline when new content is updated.

Key features include:

• A user interface that automatically scales for PCs, tablets, and mobile phones across virtually every browser and operating system.

• A search interface that lets people easily find what they’re looking for, including the ability to choose from gallery view or list view and to narrow-down search results by media type and/or by year.

• The ability to easily download any media found on the site—or share it on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

• Access to the metadata associated with each asset, such as file size, file format, which center created the asset, and when it was created. When available, users can also view EXIF/camera data for still images such as exposure, shutter speed, and lens used.

• An application programming interface (API) for automated uploads of new content—including integration with NASA’s existing authentication mechanism.

Architecture that has been made

The NASA Image and Video Library is a cloud-native solution, with the front-end web app separated from the backend API. It runs as immutable infrastructure in a fully automated environment, with all infrastructure defined in code to support continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

In building the solution, ManTech International took advantage of the following AWS services:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. This enables NASA to scale up under load and scale down during periods of inactivity to save money, and pay for only what it uses.

• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which is used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, as required to achieve redundancy and fault-tolerance.

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which supports object storage for incoming (uploaded) media, metadata, and published assets.

• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which is used to decouple incoming jobs from pipeline processes.

• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which is used for automatic synchronization and failover.

• Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service, which is used to track incoming jobs, published assets, and users.

• Amazon Elastic Transcoder, which is used to transcode audio and video to various resolutions.

• Amazon CloudSearch, which is used to support searching by free text or fields.

• Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), which is used to trigger the processing pipeline when new content is uploaded.

• AWS CloudFormation, which enables automated creation, updating, and destruction of AWS resources. ManTech International also used the Troposphere library, which enables the creation of objects via AWS CloudFormation using Python instead of hand-coded JSON—each object representing one AWS resource such as an instance, an Elastic IP (EIP) address, or a security group.

• Amazon CloudWatch, which provides a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications running on AWS.

How NASA got benefitted?

Through its use of AWS, with support from ManTech International, NASA is making its vast wealth of pictures, videos, and audio files—previously in some 60 “collections” across NASA’s 10 centers—easily discoverable in one centralized location, delivering these benefits:

• Easy Access to the Wonders of Space. The Image and Video Library automatically optimizes the user experience for each user’s particular device. It is also fully compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires federal agencies to make their technology solutions accessible to people with disabilities. Captions can be turned on or off for videos played on the site, and text-based caption files can be downloaded for any video.

• Built-in Scalability. All components of the NASA Image and Video Library are built to scale on demand, as needed to handle usage spikes. “On-demand scalability will be invaluable for events such as the solar eclipse that’s happening later this summer—both as we upload new media and as the public comes to view that content,” says Bryan Walls, Imagery Experts Deputy Program Manager at NASA.

• Good Use of Taxpayer Dollars. By building its Image and Video Library in the cloud, NASA avoided the costs associated with deploying and maintaining server and storage hardware in-house. Instead, the agency can simply pay for the AWS resources it uses at any given time.

While NASA’s new Image and Video Library delivers a wealth of new convenience and capabilities. NASA now have an agile, scalable foundation on which to do all kinds of amazing things.

“Much like with the exploration of space, we’re just starting to imagine all that we can do with it.”

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