AWS Questions: Cloudfront and SQS

I have recently started a contract teaching AWS courses. (None of the following posts speak for my client.) AWS stands for Amazon Web Services.

During every course I teach I get questions that are not directly covered in the course material that I don’t know. I’m going to try to capture some of the questions asked by my students and post the answers.

• Does SQS have transactional messages akin to JMS?
  • No.  JMS has the idea of transactions over messages, so you can be sure that all or none of the messages were processed.  SQS has no such construct–each message is independent.  If I were going to have multiple units of work done, I’d use one message, perhaps pointing to different datastores if the message was too big for SQS.
• Can you push content to the AWS CDN, Cloudfront, ahead of use requests?
  • No, the content always has to be pulled by a requester.  You can of course configure a crawler to pull the data from the origins through Cloudfront (which will then store it).
• Can you configure Cloudfront to pull from origins over SSL/TLS?
  • Yes.