AWS in Real Systems: SQS, SES, and S3 Working Together

AWS primitives stay powerful when you treat them as part of a system story, not a checklist.

SQS for backpressure and retries

Queues separate request time from processing time. I design consumers to be idempotent because delivery guarantees are rarely “exactly once.”

S3 as the system of record for bulky artifacts

For generated files and large uploads, object storage keeps databases lean and backups simpler—metadata in SQL, bytes in S3.

SES for outbound comms

I isolate email sending behind a service boundary, track provider events when possible, and ensure failures do not corrupt core domain state.