HACKER Q&A
📣 viraptor

What's a global, low throughput, low latency message bus service?


I'm looking for a SaaS solution where I can send 10msgs a day per endpoint, but with <1s latency to deliver.

I need the ad-hoc, independent queues to be trivially created based on a shared publisher/consumer key and I don't care about persistence - if a msg is not delivered immediately, it should be dropped. All endpoints are behind Nat, so some polling is required.

Is there a service that would help me here? SNS almost works, but creating/restricting individual queues ad-hoc makes it more work than I want to deal with. Can something else provide a trivial "send(secret, queue name, message)" and "listen(secret, queue)" functionality?

I'm a little tempted to just use Telegram for this.

  👤 atonse Accepted Answer ✓
Are you on AWS?

For your 10 messages a day, how about something even simpler, just throw them into an s3 bucket and trigger a lambda on save?

It would cost nothing, would be durable.

👤 mxuribe
When you mentioned telegram, i was going to suggest trying out the matrix protocol. The protocol itself is not only designed for chat, that is merely only one admittedly popular use-case. And in conjunction with matrix, i was going to further suggest try to leverage a different transport layer that has lowerr latency instead of current http...which i know matrix org was testing out some time ago...But, then...you said you wanted a SaaS...which i'm not aware of any that exist for your use case. So, maybe try a Saas for Mqtt, etc.
👤 evanwillms
I've had success using the self-service tier from Ably.com, which is <$100 USD/mo. [1]

Their client libraries handled most of the edge-cases that I would have had to worry about using SQS or a message broker on my own. It seems like they're scaling using sensible technologies on the back-end and have very approachable pricing for early-growth projects compared to some of the enterprise focused alternatives.

[1] https://ably.com/pricing

👤 tyingq
If you wanted something where you could get pretty far without spending any money, Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects would be an interesting path. You would have to implement some of the functionality yourself, but there are some examples.

Like this example chat app: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-chat-demo/blob/master/... It supports private chat rooms, which is somewhat analogous to a pub sub topic.

👤 speedgoose
A good message broker can do that. Like RabbitMQ with MQTT or AMQP.

You can deploy a rabbitmq software container using your favourite cloud provider. It’s not much work.

👤 tifkap
Not low latency, but onion-adresses/services are actually ideal for this. You only need to know the onion adress, to know that you connect to the correct node.

* encrypted * automatic NAT punching * complete location independence * use 0MQ with tor as transport if you want a queue on top .

Or if it has to be fast and low latency: 0MQ with eliptic curve encryption.

👤 scott00
Any managed postgresql will do: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-notify.html
👤 ilaksh
Try https://www.tinc-vpn.org/ and redis pub-sub.
👤 wizwit999
SQS?