A lot of comments in this thread are voicing concerns over the marketed cost/performance benefits of AWS and the reliability of their services in the case of region failure e.g. the API services goes down.

But are there benefits to using Amazon's more high-level services such as SQS and SNS which, supposedly, replicate their configuration state and data across multiple regions, in terms of reliability?

For instance, on a per-instance basis AWS might be more expensive than a bare-metal provider, and there's nothing to stop you running your own RabbitMQ instance. But SQS messages are replicated across three regions, so if you were building an equivalent service you'd need three instances in different regions and a reliable distributed message queue.

So does that additional complexity/cost make SQS at all worthwhile? Or does it come down to the fact that, while your own hand-rolled service would require more management, your potential message throughput at a given cost would be much higher than with SQS?