SQS "Fair Queues"

[lukewaite-intouch]

Overview

SQS has announced a new feature called "fair queues" for multi-tenant workloads.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/07/amazon-sqs-introduces-fair/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-resilient-multi-tenant-systems-with-amazon-sqs-fair-queues/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/sqs-fair-queues.html

Fair queues are particularly valuable for SaaS applications serving multiple customers through shared queues, microservices processing events from multiple resources, and applications handling messages for different request types. Fair queues help maintain consistent dwell time (the time a message spends in the queue between being sent and received) across tenants by reordering messages when a single tenant causes the queue to build a backlog. The queue then prioritizes delivering messages from other tenants. Messages from the tenant causing the backlog continue to be delivered to consumers, but their dwell time increases based on your available consumer capacity.

How To Support

To enable fair queues, include a message group ID when sending messages to your Amazon SQS standard queues.

AWS' latest documentation now recommends "that you include a MessageGroupId in all messages when using fair queues".

Currently, SqsQueue->pushRaw is responsible for submitting the message payload:

    public function pushRaw($payload, $queue = null, array $options = [])
    {
        return $this->sqs->sendMessage([
            'QueueUrl' => $this->getQueue($queue), 'MessageBody' => $payload, ...$options,
        ])->get('MessageId');
    }

So this method would need to being passing through a customizable string, that presumably some trait on a Job might set. eg:

    public function pushRaw($payload, $queue = null, $messageGroupId = '', array $options = [])
    {
        return $this->sqs->sendMessage([
            'QueueUrl' => $this->getQueue($queue), 
            'MessageBody' => $payload,
            'MessageGroupId' => $messageGroupId, 
            ...$options,
        ])->get('MessageId');
    }

It could obviously just be passed into the splat on options, but for clarity's sake I break it out above.

There is a bit of prior work on handling MessageGroupId in the community, as this property was first introduced in support of SQS FIFO Queues, and there is a community SQS Fifo Queue project.
https://github.com/shiftonelabs/laravel-sqs-fifo-queue?tab=readme-ov-file#message-groups

Initially, I had thought that perhaps the $queue concept in the queue, could be re-used since I did not believe it was supported for SQS, but that appears to have changed and it is now used to an extend in support of prefix based queues.

Ideally, I think given the AWS recommendation "that you include a MessageGroupId in all messages when using fair queues", I think this should be in the framework itself, rather than built out as another standalone plugin. If un-configured a string of default could be used, which would be a non-breaking change, assuming we can find a non-breaking way to expose the behaviour that is acceptable to maintainers.