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SQS - Dead Letter Queues

  • If a consumer failts to process a message within the Visibility Timeout - the message goes back to the queue.
  • We can set a threshold of how many times a message can go back to the queue.

  • After the MaximumReceives threshold is exceeded, the message goes into a dead letter queue (DLQ)

  • Useful for debugging

  • Make sure to process the messages in the DLQ before they expire
    • Good to set a retention to 14 days in the DLQ

Redrive to Source

  • Feature to help consume messages in the DLQ to understand what is wrong with them
  • When our code is fixed, we can redrive the messages from the DLQ back into the source queue (or any other queue) in batches wihout writing custom code.