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Amazon MQ

Amazon MQ operates Apache ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ brokers for applications that require those ecosystems, wire protocols, client libraries, or migration compatibility.

Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with Amazon MQ.

Amazon MQ pricing and cost programs

Pricing model: Managed broker usage

On-Demand
Available
Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
Available
Savings Plans
Not applicable
Spot
Not applicable

Billing dimensions: Broker instance hours · Storage · Data transfer

Programs and modes: On-Demand Brokers · Reserved Broker Instances · Active/standby deployments

Reserved Broker Instances apply only to eligible broker engines, sizes, and Regions.

Free Tier: Service-specific — verify current offers

Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.

Official AWS pricing

Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.

Why implement Amazon MQ?

  • Preserves familiar broker APIs and protocols such as JMS, AMQP, MQTT, STOMP, OpenWire, or RabbitMQ clients when rewriting to AWS-native messaging is impractical.
  • Automates broker provisioning, hardware replacement, maintenance, backups for supported configurations, and multi-node availability options.
  • Supports VPC isolation, TLS, broker users, engine configuration, CloudWatch metrics and logs, and service-managed deployment operations.

How to implement Amazon MQ

  1. Inventory current engine features, protocols, plugins, destinations, message size, persistence, throughput, connection count, transaction behavior, and compatibility before choosing ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ.
  2. Deploy a supported production topology in private subnets with appropriate instance size, storage, encryption, security groups, users or authorization maps, and only required protocol ports.
  3. Configure clients with multiple endpoints, pooling, heartbeats, acknowledgements, publisher confirms or transactions as required, reconnect backoff, and monitored queues; migrate and fail over under realistic load.

Amazon MQ best practices

  • Use redundant production deployment modes, keep brokers private, restrict protocols and destinations, use TLS and strong rotated credentials, and apply least-privilege authorization maps or RabbitMQ permissions.
  • For current RabbitMQ production clusters, use quorum queues where supported, right-size brokers, reuse connections with multiple channels, and prevent unbounded queues and connection churn.
  • Monitor memory, CPU, storage, connections, consumers, acknowledgements, queue depth and age, test maintenance and broker failure, and keep client and engine versions within AWS-supported compatibility.

Amazon MQ use cases and server impact

  • Lift-and-modernize JMS applications
  • Managed RabbitMQ-compatible messaging
  • Protocol bridging for existing enterprise applications

Replaces self-managed ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ broker hosts, but application protocol semantics, destination design, client recovery, backlog control, and migration compatibility still require active ownership.

Official implementation resources

Commonly paired AWS services