Amazon SQS turns 20: Two decades of reliable messaging at scale

On July 13, 2006, we launched Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) as one of the first three services available to customers, alongside Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 . We had learned firsthand that distributed systems need a reliable way to pass messages between components without creating tight dependencies. If one service called another directly and that service was slow or unavailable, failures cascaded through the entire system.