Comparing Windows Azure Queue Service and Amazon Simple Queue Service–Summary

Over the past few weeks, I have been writing a detailed blog post comparing Windows Azure Queue Service and Amazon Simple Queue Service. You can read that post here: https://gauravmantri.com/2012/03/27/comparing-windows-azure-queue-service-and-amazon-simple-queue-service/. This post turned out to be rather big as there was so much to cover so I thought why not summarize that post in a smaller one and hence this post.

Like the other post, for the sake of brevity we’re going to refer Windows Azure Queue Service as WAQS and Amazon Simple Queue Service as ASQS in the rest of this blog post as well.

Following table provides a comparison summary of features in WAQS and ASQS.

	WAQS	ASQS
Current service version	2011-08-18	2011-10-01
Ability to create queues	Yes	Yes
Minimum/Maximum length of queue name	3/63	1/80
Queue name case sensitivity	Lowercase only	Mixed case
Valid characters	Alphanumeric, and Dash (-)	Alphanumeric, Dash (-) and Hyphen (_)
Specify custom metadata while creating queue	Yes	No
Specify settings for system attributes while creating queue	No	Yes
Ability to list queues	Yes	Yes
Supports specifying “prefix” to fetch partial list of queues	Yes	Yes
Maximum records returned per call	5000	1000
Optionally return metadata	Yes	No
Ability to limit the result size	Yes	No
Concept of continuation token to fetch next set of queues	Yes	No
Ability to delete a queue	Yes	Yes
Ability to fetch custom metadata for a queue	Yes	No
Ability to fetch system attributes for a queue	No	Yes
Ability to set custom metadata for a queue	Yes	No
Ability to set system attributes for a queue	No	Yes
Programmatically get URL for a queue	No	Yes
Ability to create message	Yes	Yes
Maximum size of a message	64KB	64KB
Ability to make message invisible immediately after creation	Yes	Yes
Maximum age of a message in a queue before it is automatically deleted by the system	7 Days	4 Days
Maximum value for a visibility timeout for a message in a queue at the time of creation	7 Days	15 Minutes
Ability to create messages in bulk (batch)	No	Yes
Maximum number of messages which can be created in a batch	N/A	10
Ability to fetch messages and making them invisible to other callers for some time	Yes	Yes
Maximum number messages which can be fetched in a single call to the service	32	10
Maximum value for a visibility timeout for a message when fetching the messages	7 Days	12 Hours
Ability to fetch messages but not altering their visibility	Yes	No
Ability to delete a message	Yes	Yes
Ability to delete messages in bulk (batch)	No	Yes
Ability to update content of a message	Yes	No
Ability to update visibility timeout of a message	Yes	Yes
Ability to update visibility timeout of messages in bulk (batch)	No	Yes
Maximum number of messages for which visibility timeout can be changed in bulk (batch)	N/A	10
Ability to clear a queue i.e. delete all messages while preserving queue	Yes	No
Ability to grant permissions to other user on a queue	No	Yes
Ability to revoke permission on a queue	No	Yes

I hope you will find it useful.