The self-emptying DLQ: auto-healing event-driven architectures on AWS

A vendor changes a field type without bumping the API version. Nobody tells you. Your schema validation starts rejecting every inbound order, and within twenty minutes 5,000 webhooks are sitting in an SQS dead letter queue with a retention clock ticking four days by default, fourteen at the outside. The concrete version of this: Shopify's order payload carries both a numeric id ( 820982911946154500 ) and a human facing name ( #1001 ). A middleware layer starts mapping name into the field your…