[lobster_johnson]

SQS is very simple and the solution here requires that the publisher knows all the listeners.

If you use RabbitMQ (which are we using in our own microservice architecture), you can use fanout exchanges based on topics to accomplish the same thing more elegantly.

In this topology, every message sent to that exchange gets copied to any queue bound to that exchange.

This system also supports routing via "topics", which are paths that support wildcards; the publisher can publish to "foo.bar.baz", and queues can bind to the exchange using the routing key "foo.*.baz", for example.

We use this to listen to specific events, eg. a specific app is associated with content under the path "someapp.someclient". A data store publishes modification events with "create", "update" or "delete" followed by the path; so the the app, to get the stream of updates, simply listens to "create.someapp.someclient.#", "update.someapp.someclient.#" and "delete.someapp.someclient.#".

[a-priori]

You can use SNS to act as a fanout exchange. Then you just need to subscribe all your SQS queues to the SNS topic. Events get pushed to the SNS topic, and SNS will distribute them to all the queues for you with the pusher needing to know anything about the subscribers.