AWS Simple Notification Service

March 11, 2021 / Nirav Shah

AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS)

This is the AWS service that allows you to send individual messages to a large number of recipients or other distributed AWS services.

• SNS is a Push notification AWS service.
• SNS is a fast, flexible, fully managed notification service.
• It is a web service that coordinates and manages the delivery or sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients.
• Messages published to an SNS topic will be delivered to the subscriber immediately.
• This is a pay-as-you-go model with no upfront cost AWS service.
• Reliable service.
• At least three copies of the data are stored across multiple AZ in the same region.
• It is a way of sending a message when you are using auto-scaling, it triggers an SNS service which will email you that “Your EC2 instance is growing”.

• Publisher – Publisher is also known as producers that produce and send the message to the SNS which is a logical access point.
• – Subscriber such as web servers, email addresses, Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda, receive the message or notification from the SNS over one of the supported protocols, Like Amazon SQS, Emails, Lambda, HTTPS, SMS.

SNS Topic

• It is a logical point and communication channel.
• Each topic has a unique name.
• A topic Name is limited to 256 alphanumeric characters
• The topic name must be unique within the AWS account
• Each topic is assigned an AWS ARN once it gets created.
• A topic can support Subscribers and notification deliveries over multiple protocols
• Messages/requests published to a single topic can be delivered to multiple protocols as configured when creating each subscriber.
• Delivery formats/transport protocols(end-points)
  • SMS
  • Emails
  • EMail – Json for applications
  • HTTP/HTTPS
  • SQS
  • AWS lambda
• Supported push Notifications Platforms
  • Amazon Device Messaging
  • Apple Push Notifications service
  • Google cloud messaging
  • Windows Push Notification service

There are some Amazon SNS alternatives

• Amazon Kinesis Datastream
• Amazon Managed queue service
• Apache Kafka
• Twilio
• Pusher

Amazon SNS have different prices as per the region. Please go through the official page for more information.

Also Read: 17 NEW AWS SERVICES IN 2022 | AWS LATEST SERVICES

FAQs:

1. How do I publish a message to an SNS topic?
2. Can I customize the message format when publishing to SNS?
3. Is there a limit to the number of subscriptions or topics I can have in SNS?
4. Can I use SNS with other AWS services?