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Simple Message Queue (formerly MNS):Message channel between cloud products

Last Updated:Jun 03, 2026

Simple Message Queue (SMQ, formerly MNS) is the preferred message channel for many Alibaba Cloud products. Its simple queue model, lightweight protocol, pay-as-you-go billing, lossless publishing, and multi-zone high availability ensure reliable messaging between cloud products and user applications.

Scenario 1: Subscribe to cloud product events and async task results

Scenario

Description

OSS event notifications

OSS events are pushed to an SMQ queue or topic for downstream business processing.

Route Cloud Monitor alerts to SMQ

Alert events are written to an SMQ queue or topic for automated processing by consumer applications.

Auto Scaling

Scaling group events are written to an SMQ queue or topic for automated processing by consumer applications.

Intelligent Media Services (IMS)

Task callbacks are written to an SMQ queue. Consume queue messages to track task progress and status.

Scenario 2: Trigger task or function execution through messages

Scenario

Description

Function Compute

Use an SMQ queue or topic as the event source to trigger function execution. Messages matching trigger rules automatically invoke the associated function.

EventBridge

Use an SMQ queue as the event source for an event stream to trigger its execution.

Scenario 3: Messaging between user applications and cloud products

Scenario

Description

IoT Platform

For complex or fine-grained device data processing, user applications send device messages to SMQ, and IoT Platform consumes queue messages to retrieve device event information.

Function Compute

Function execution data and results are delivered to an SMQ queue for automated processing by user applications.