Curiouser and curiouser! (Queueing Services from a platform provider posing as a bookseller)

Amazon just announced their Simple Queue Service (hereafter referred to as SQS). SQS is a simple, hosted queuing service for buffering messages between distributed application components. Amazon is clearly becoming a platform company (much like Google with their recent Desktop Search tool, gmail and someday perhaps the long-rumored gbrowser).

The service supports both SOAP and REST interfaces (sample REST inquiry on .NET books is here). SQS uses a "relaxed" FIFO behavior that apparently doesn’t guarantee that your data stays in order, but the queues will guarantee that data shows up at the end of the list. Queue entries are limited to 4K in size and queues are restricted to 4,000 entries.

The WSDL for this service is here.   There is no charge (yet) for this service.

Curiouser and curiouser...