Amazon SNS

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a web service for setting up, operating, and sending notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective capability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications.

Amazon SNS follows the "publish-subscribe" (pub-sub) messaging paradigm, with notifications being delivered to clients using a "push" mechanism that eliminates the need to periodically check or "poll" for new information and updates.

With simple APIs requiring minimal up-front development effort, no maintenance or management overhead and pay-as-you-go pricing, Amazon SNS gives developers an easy mechanism to incorporate a powerful notification system with their applications.

Delivery

Besides pushing cloud notifications directly to mobile devices, Amazon SNS can also deliver notifications by SMS text message or email to Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, or to any HTTP endpoint.

SNS notifications can also trigger Lambda functions. When a message is published to an SNS topic that has a Lambda function subscribed to it, the Lambda function is invoked with the payload of the published message.

To prevent messages from being lost, all messages published to Amazon SNS are stored redundantly across multiple availability zones. Pricing is different for the different delivery types.

SNS Topics

SNS allows you to group multiple recipients using topics. A topic is an "access point" for allowing recipients to dynamically subscribe for identical copies of the same notification.

One topic can support deliveries to multiple endpoint types – for example, you can group together iOS, Android, and SMS recipients. When you publish once to a topic, SNS delivers appropriately formatted copies of your message to each subscriber.

Benefits

  • Instantaneous, push-based delivery (no polling).
  • Simple APIs and easy integration with applications.
  • Flexible message delivery over multiple transport protocols.
  • Inexpensive, pay-as-you-go model with no up-front costs.
  • Web-based AWS Management Console offers the simplicity of a point-and-click interface.

SNS vs. SQS

Both messaging services. SNS is push, SQS is poll (pull).

SNS vs. SES

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is email-only. It's good for automated emails, newsletters, and advertisements. SES just requires an email address, SNS requires a subscription.