# Amazon SQS Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-sqs/ 14 people recommended Amazon SQS in Hacker News comments, 4 had mixed feelings and 13 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 12 months, in 11 threads. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Cheap, reliable managed message queue that is simple to start with and needs little upkeep; critics warn of complex plumbing, timeouts and surprise usage costs. Summary written by Claude from 30 comments. It was written before the November 2026 recount, and 29 of those comments still count. ## Why people recommend it - Default queue within AWS stacks (5 comments in the sample): "SQS is dead simple, and if your in AWS (forever) it is "in the stack" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47733415)) "I like ECS + Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49478967)) "S3, SQS, EC2 and VPC were great innovations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48255857)) - Simple to set up (2 comments in the sample): "There are lots of purpose-built bullet proof queuing systems that are simple to setup and administer (or just use SQS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48666879)) "because it was one less thing we needed to spend time on" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49377738)) - Handles traffic spikes well (2 comments in the sample): "With SQS and their recent fair queues, you not only don't need to worry about the spikes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173452)) "They made it easy to configure throttling, alerting, buffering" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46770952)) ## What people warn about - Adds complex multi-service plumbing (4 comments in the sample): "a myriad of intermediate steps are introduced to write data to dynamo/s3/kinesis + sqs/and coordination" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902012)) "it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836330)) "we burned time on a Postgres+SQS setup where the enqueue happened in a trigger" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890221)) - Reliability problems and timeouts (3 comments in the sample): "Retried/poison sqs messages are a problem. They will eventually clog up your queue" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49191881)) "Also had SQS queues time out several times this week" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337844)) "near-criminally incompetent design of SQS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026231)) - Poor fit for long-running workflows (2 comments in the sample): "I see people choose Kafka and SQS for things that Graphile Worker could do all day long." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47733204)) "Message queues (e.g. SQS) are inappropriate for tracking long-running tasks/workflows." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008154)) - Surprise usage costs (2 comments in the sample): "over the next couple of hours my run rate went to about $4k per day in cloudtrail+sqs usage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49950525)) "because they're "so cheap!!11" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875028)) ## Other message brokers people recommend - [Apache Kafka](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-kafka/): 31 recommend, 18 mixed, 49 criticize - [NATS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nats/): 21 recommend, 10 mixed, 14 criticize - [Redpanda](https://hackerapproved.com/p/redpanda/): 17 recommend, 0 mixed, 4 criticize - [PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgresql-listen-notify/): 9 recommend, 3 mixed, 10 criticize ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/) ## The badge A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged. ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Amazon SQS", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-sqs/ (14 recommend, 4 mixed, 13 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026). Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.