Amazon SNS vs IronMQ

Amazon SNS is a managed publish/subscribe service for sending messages between applications and reaching people. It can deliver notifications to application endpoints and send SMS, mobile push, and email. Standard topics support nearly unlimited messages per second with best-effort ordering and deduplication; FIFO topics preserve order and prevent duplicate delivery within five minutes, with limits of 3,000 messages per second or 10 MB per second per topic. Publishers can batch 1 to 10 messages per request, while subscribers can filter notifications. Integrations include AWS event sources and destinations such as SQS, Data Firehose, Lambda, and HTTPS. Each message can contain up to 256 KB; the Extended Client Library can store payloads up to 2 GB in S3 and publish an object reference. SNS retries delivery and supports dead-letter queues. The free tier includes 1 million requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications, and 1,000 email notifications each month. Listed paid rates include $0.50 per month for API requests, $0.06 for HTTP deliveries, and $2.00 for email deliveries; charges depend on usage.

IronMQ is a persistent message queue for communication between services and components in distributed applications. It supports push and pull queues, long polling, error queues, alerts, and triggers, as well as dead-letter queues and ordering within each queue. Delivery is described as best-effort and one-time, a behavior application teams should account for in message handling. Its HTTPS and REST-based APIs support HTTP/REST, Amazon SQS, and OpenStack Marconi protocols. During an outage, queues can automatically point to alternative availability zones without code changes. Deployment options include shared, dedicated, and on-premise environments. Documentation lists client libraries for Go, Ruby,.NET, Java, PHP, Python, Node, and Rust, plus community-supported Apache Camel and Clojure libraries. Iron.io says OAuth and SSL protect data in transit, and recommends client-side encryption for especially sensitive payloads at rest. The free Basic plan includes 100K API requests per month, limited queues, and a 64k message size limit. Entry costs $399 a month; a full-feature 14-day trial is offered for non-dedicated clusters.