Sorry, my question was a bit vague. Generally SQS works with polling, and once a message has been pulled from a queue it is not available to other viewers any longer. This makes it hard to create a system where you have an unknown number of clients that may or may not be interested in certain queues, or even in messages of certain types.

RabbitMQ (and other AMQP based queueing systems) have built-in solutions for this that SQS doesn't offer. Karma solved it by sending the same message to a number of different queues, but this makes scaling to more clients harder, and reduces flexibility in subscribing clients to certain message types.

Hope this makes it clearer :-).

That's where SNS comes in. We publish to SNS which will fan out to multiple SQS queues. When a new service is built, it says to SNS "subscribe my queue to these topics". The publisher of the event doesn't know about the subscribers.

Ah, nice, I didn't know the integration of SNS and SQS worked that way. Cool!