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This does seem a little unfair, but I'm not sure what the alternative is, since it does cost resources to check if the queue is empty.

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An event-based model would have done the trick. Register a listener to a message queue, and when a message arrives, the queue handler sends it an event. It would make things a little more complicated, but it also imposes less load on the servers on both sides by making polling unnecessary.

I agree. SQS's design has its uses and S3's ordered key-space makes it easy to create queue structures without this behavior if that's what you think you want.

The thing I too would like to see from AWS would be some kind of callback api where an HTTP request would be sent to an EC2 instance when something useful happens in S3. That would allow you to dispense with polling entirely.

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