Givin' Amazon cloud services some luv... Why you should consider using Amazon for SOA needs

So the Los Techies Open Spaces Event was amazing. I have never in an environment where I was surrounded by so many people that just "got it". It was just awesome.

There was a re-occurring theme (besides FUBU and javascript) that I found myself gravitating to, it was EventSourcing and messaging patterns (surprise huh). The last session was on messaging systems, and I was surprised to kinda be the lone voice in the room mentioning Amazon services. I figured I'd make a quick blog post where I show the actual pub/sub guts of WhaleBus, and how simple it is to get messaging working on the Amazon cloud.

First of all, go sign up for AWS, it's free to sign up, and the free tier allows 100K SNS and SQS requests and up to 1K email notifications.

Done? Ok cool, let's get to coding.

Let's publish a message to the cloud real quick like.  Spin yourself up a project and get AWSSDK.dll (it's on nuget- just search for Amazon, it's the first result).

So, first, let's create a "Topic" to publish our messages to. Amazon gives us a web interface to do this, but who wants that? Let's do it programmatically...

Simple enough, I see the topic arn on my console when I run it. And I can see the new topic in my aws console.
Next up, let's publish a messages to that topic. First, let's just set up an email end point through the aws console (we can do it programatically just as well, but I wanna publish real quick like).

Create an Email Endpoint UI in AWS console

Now, amazon sends me an email to the address I specified and makes me opt in (otherwise this would be a really cool way to piss people off, huh?). I follow the link in the email. Subscriber is done.

Simple enough, right?
Now, when I publish a message to this topic, I SHOULD get a email with the message json serialized.  Let's try it out.


Run the test, and check my email, and booya!

So, there we go, I just created a topic, then published a message to that topic. However, I'm having a hard time seeing how useful getting emails of published messages is, I mean, I could just send myself an email with a subject of "Elliott has an awesome blog" and a body of "Hello from the cloud" and get the same result, right?

So, lets, now go set up a subscriber that has a little more value. SNS supports HTTP posts, but let's not do that, lets use an SQS queue.  Yeah, we can create one through their ui, but lets do it with code.
Ok, ok, lots of code there, but it's almost all security stuff that you'll only do once per sqs queue.
Everything from line 21 - 30 is simply setting the security to allow SNS to publish messages to the newly created SQS queue.

Now,  let's create a go publish that message again and write a quick little test that'll pull messages from the sqs queue. So, I run the publish_a_message test, and I see the email arrive. So I know the message made it to SNS, let's write the code to pull from the sqs queue.


All this code is doing is looping for 5 seconds and calling RecieveMessage, then writing the contents of the message to the console. Here's what I see.
So, yeah, it works, and it's simple. So I like it. Whatta ya think?