Whitepaper compares cloud messaging platforms, Amazon SQS and Linxter

Cloud-based computing promises to revolutionize distributed applications, capitalizing on the ubiquity of the internet and allowing corporate IT departments to provision a wide variety of information services without having to assume responsibility for every piece of the puzzle.

This is how Libertas Technologies, one of our partners, begins their recent whitepaper in which Linxter and Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS) are compared. Comparing Cloud Messaging Platforms, an eight page no-nonsense report, does a great job stepping through a series of benchmark tests and highlighting key differences between Linxter and Amazon SQS. The differences primarily came down to ease of use and performance.

What their chart says:

• Linxter was almost 10x faster than SQS for messages sent per second and 6x faster for messages received
• SQS sends 7.7x more data packets and transmits 6.9x more bytes than Linxter when sending the same number of small messages – the difference is much greater when the messages are larger than 8KBs

What you won’t find in the chart, but you’ll find in the report:

• Linxter is much easier to use with far less coding
• Linxter’s fees are simpler and more straightforward (with SQS you are charged for each request and it can take between 4 and 7 requests to send a single message from point-to-point)
• Linxter provides these additional features which are not available with SQS
• asynchronous – both message sending and receiving are non-blocking to your program and run in the background
• message polling – no need to write your own message polling code
• local transactional queues for sending – messages are not taken off of local queues until it is verified they are received, even when a program instance is shutdown and restarted
• communication channel management – back-end management of communication channels and ability for program instances to self-manage their own channels
• automatically created individual cloud queues for message retrieval – no need to parse messages in a shared queue to determine who they are for
• self-managed cloud queue awareness – no need to write code for updating your program instances on what queues to use, this is all self-managed and dynamic

Additional features that Linxter provides:

• built-in Internet connection retries
• automatic message sending and receiving retries
• dynamic endpoint reconfiguration
• tags for messages
• message non-repudiation
• file attachments for messages
• file chunking

In conclusion, Libertas suggests that both cloud messaging services are great in that they are both solid offerings that eliminate the need to “roll your own” communication foundation to connect disparate apps or integrate disparate systems. However, because Linxter and Amazon SQS differ significantly in implementation, price model and performance, Libertas suggests thoroughly evaluating both solutions before implementing. Lucky for you, we’ve even made evaluation a snap! You can run your own benchmark tests using our open source Performance Tester.