In our experience of ELB/SQS, AWS has done a good job on these services. A few things we noted:<p>- ELB takes about ~15 minutes to scale out completely when you hit traffic spikes.<p>- SQS is simple to use, rather cost-effective and quite reliable. It will add a bit of latency, but as the author notes, this can't replace Kinesis.<p>- The redrive policy on SQS is really nice to catch corner cases.