Amazon SQS is a distributed queue system. With Amazon SQS, web services can queue messages generated by one application component so they are available to be consumed by another component. Similar to other messaging systems like JMS, the queue is a temporary repository for messages that await processing. Each message can contain up to 256 KB of text, in any format.

Amazon SQS provides an API that enables applications to retrieve the messages. You might also be able to use the Amazon SQS Extended Client Library for Java, which enables you to store larger payloads with Amazon S3.

With Amazon SQS connections and related events, you can enable processes that are triggered by receipt of a message in a monitored SQS queue. For example, you might have an SQS queue that triggers an order processing workflow on a service bus in Amazon Web Services communicating over an API.

Refer to the Amazon SQS documentation for more information.