AwsSolutions-SQS3

SQS queue has no dead-letter queue

What it means

The queue has no redrive policy pointing at a dead-letter queue.

Why it matters

A message that always fails is retried forever, and it blocks everything behind it in a FIFO queue. Worse, the failure looks like throughput: the consumer is busy, metrics look alive, and nothing is progressing.

How to fix it

Add `deadLetterQueue: { queue: dlq, maxReceiveCount: 3 }`, then alarm on the DLQ having any messages at all.

See it fail

This stack trips AwsSolutions-SQS3 for real. Open it in the playground, press Run, and the finding appears with everything else the engine has to say about it.

Open “Unencrypted SQS queue” in the playground →

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