Optimizing SQS Usage to Cut Costs

Your organization noticed that costs for SQS went up and have asked your team to investigate. You found that message requests are high, but there is not an equivalent rise in user activity. There are several CloudWatch metrics that raise some concerns. The first is the `NumberOfEmptyReceives` metric. This metric supports the idea that roughly out of every 10 messages received, we have about 30 empty receives. That will surely raise our costs. The other CloudWatch metric, `SentMessageSize`, reports the size of the messages is 256 KB, but these messages can be reduced to plain text to lower the size to 64 KB, which will cut costs as well. We will review current costs in SQS and the costs of the proposed changes before we move forward with those changes. Then, we will need to create an SQS queue that allows for long polling at 20 seconds to cut the number of empty receives and limit message size to 64 KB. Finally, we will test our SQS queue to ensure that it is able to send and receive messages.