AWS Messaging Services Compared: How to Choose Between SNS, SQS, Kinesis, and More

Senior Application Architect Swetha Golla published a decision guide on DEV Community outlining when to use each of AWS's six major messaging services: SNS, SQS, Kinesis, MSK, EventBridge, and Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ. The article uses a real-world scenario where a platform team's single overloaded RabbitMQ broker became a bottleneck after handling unrelated workloads together, causing a queue-depth spike during a 2025 promotion that delayed unrelated consumers. Golla argues the core mistake teams make is treating these services as interchangeable, when each solves a distinct problem — for example, SQS suits simple durable buffering, SNS handles fan-out to many subscribers, and Kinesis or MSK are appropriate when strict ordering and message replay are required. MSK is recommended for teams needing true Kafka wire-protocol compatibility, while EventBridge fits content-based routing to multiple differently-interested targets. The guide is scoped specifically to AWS-native services and does not cover alternatives such as Google Pub/Sub, Azure Service Bus, or self-hosted Kafka.