AWS Certified Developer Associate Practice Exam

The maximum long poll timeout for Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is indeed 20 seconds. Long polling is a technique that helps to reduce the number of empty responses when there are no messages available in the queue. By setting a long poll timeout, the receive message call can wait for up to 20 seconds for a message to become available before returning a response.

When you configure a long poll timeout, it allows the receive message request to hold the connection open until a message arrives or the timeout period is reached. This leads to more efficient use of resources and reduces the number of API requests made by the application since it can wait for a message rather than continuously polling the queue.

The options indicating shorter timeouts, such as 10 seconds, do not utilize the maximum potential of long polling, while choices that go beyond 20 seconds also exceed the allowed limit within the SQS service guidelines. Therefore, the correct answer of 20 seconds reflects the optimal setting for employing long polling in SQS effectively.