What should a solutions architect recommend for communication between the microservices?
Create an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. Add code to the data producers, and send data to the queue. Add code to the data consumers to process data from the queue.
Create an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Add code to the data producers, and publish notifications to the topic. Add code to the data consumers to subscribe to the topic.
Create an AWS Lambda function to pass messages. Add code to the data producers to call the Lambda function with a data object. Add code to the data consumers to receive a data object that is passed from the Lambda function.
Create an Amazon DynamoDB table. Enable DynamoDB Streams. Add code to the data producers to insert data into the table. Add code to the data consumers to use the DynamoDB Streams API to detect new table entries and retrieve the data.
Explanations:
Using Amazon SQS allows for decoupled communication between microservices. Producers can send messages to the SQS queue without needing to know who will consume them, and consumers can poll the queue for messages at their own pace. This aligns with the microservices architecture, providing scalability and fault tolerance.
Amazon SNS is suitable for pub/sub messaging patterns but may not be ideal for this scenario since the order of processing is not guaranteed, and there is no persistent storage for messages. This could lead to message loss if consumers are not available to receive messages immediately.
While AWS Lambda can facilitate communication, using it as a middleman for message passing can introduce unnecessary complexity and latency. It is not designed for persistent messaging like SQS or SNS, and may lead to issues with scalability and error handling for message processing.
DynamoDB Streams can be used to trigger actions based on changes in a DynamoDB table, but it introduces additional complexity by requiring a database to hold the data. This setup is less suitable for decoupled microservices compared to a message queue like SQS, especially when the order of processing does not matter.
As I understand it, the answer is:
Create an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. Add code to the data producers, and send data to the queue. Add code to the data consumers to process data from the queue.