How to explicitly acknowledge/fail Amazon SQS FIFO queue from the listener without throwing an exception? - amazon-sqs

Question

My application only listens to a certain queue, the producer is the 3rd party application. I receive the messages but sometimes based on some logic I need to send fail message to the producer so that the message is resend to my listener again until I decide to consume it and acknowledge it. My current implementation of this process is just throwing some custom exception. But this is not a clean solution, therefore can any one help me to send FAIL to producer without throwing exception.
My JMS Listener Factory settings:
#Bean
public DefaultJmsListenerContainerFactory jmsListenerContainerFactoryForQexpress(SQSErrorHandler errorHandler) {
SQSConnectionFactory connectionFactory = SQSConnectionFactory.builder()
.withRegion(RegionUtils.getRegion(StaticSystemConstants.getQexpressSqsRegion()))
.withAWSCredentialsProvider(new ClasspathPropertiesFileCredentialsProvider(StaticSystemConstants.getQexpressSqsCredentials()))
.build();
DefaultJmsListenerContainerFactory factory = new DefaultJmsListenerContainerFactory();
factory.setConnectionFactory(connectionFactory);
factory.setDestinationResolver(new DynamicDestinationResolver());
factory.setConcurrency("3-10");
factory.setSessionAcknowledgeMode(Session.CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE);
factory.setErrorHandler(errorHandler);
return factory;
}
My Listener Settings:
#JmsListener(destination = StaticSystemConstants.QUEXPRESS_ORDER_STATUS_QUEUE, containerFactory = "jmsListenerContainerFactoryForQexpress")
public void receiveQExpressOrderStatusQueue(String text) throws JSONException {
LOG.debug("Consumed QExpress status {}", text);
//here i need to decide either acknowlege or fail
...
if (success) {
updateStatus();
} else {
//todo I need to replace this with explicit FAIL message
throw new CustomException("Not right time to update status");
}
}
Please, share your experience on this. Thank you!

Answer 1

SQS -- internally speaking -- is fully asynchronous and completely decouples the producer from the consumer.
Once the producer successfully hands off a message to SQS and receives the message-id in response, the producer only knows that SQS has received and committed the message to its internal storage and that the message will be delivered to a consumer at least once.¹ There is no further feedback to the producer.
A consumer can "snooze" a message for later retry by simply not deleting it (see setSessionAcknowledgeMode docs) or by actively resetting the visibility timeout on the message instead of deleting it, which triggers SQS to leave the message in the in flight status until the timer expires, at which point it will again deliver the message for the consumer to retry.
Note, too, that a single SQS queue can have multiple producers and/or multiple consumers, as long as all the producers ask for and consumers provide identical services, but there is no intrinsic concept of which consumer or which producer. There is no consumer-to-producer backwards communication channel, and no mechanism for a producer to inquire about the status of an earlier message -- the design assumption is that once SQS has received a message, it will be delivered,² so no such mechanism should be needed.
¹at least once. Unless the queue is a FIFO queue, SQS will typically deliver the message exactly once, but there is not an absolute guarantee that the message will not be delivered more than once. Because SQS is a massive, distributed system that stores redundant copies of messages, it is possible in some edge case conditions for messages to be delivered more than once. FIFO queues avoid this possibility by leveraging stronger internal consistency guarantees, at a cost of reduced throughput of 300 TPS.
²it will be delivered assuming of course that you actually have a consumer running. SQS does not block the producer, and will allow you to enqueue an unbounded number of messages waiting for a consumer to arrive. It accepts messages from producers regardless of whether there are currently any consumers listening. The messages are held until consumed or until the MessageRetentionPeriod (default 4 days, max 14 days) timer expires for each message, whichever comes first.