What is Amazon SNS in AWS?

Amazon SNS or Simple Notification Service is useful in setting up a publisher/subscriber notification architecture in the cloud.

Samazon SNS is push based, many-to-many service which publishers can use to send to any number of subscribers. Its to be noted that it is push-based which means the messages are not stored on the server. Once they are published they are pushed out to all subscribers via API end points, SMS, borwser notifications and emails.

Amazon SNS provides topic based subscriptions as well as can enforce many admin level policies so deliver the right message to the right people under the right circumstances.

Benefits of Amazon SNS

The key benefits are:

Reliability

Amazon's multiple availability zones means high reliability and speed. Along with the massive network of data centres means high availability and scale.

Topical filtering

Topic based subscription means subscribers only get the right messages that they have an interest in

Dynamically Scale

Amazon automatically scales the service behind the scenes based on the number of messages you send.

Policy oriented

You can encrypt your data, set policies and permissions of various levels and restrictions on who can publish and subscribe.

Use cases of Amazon SNS

There are any number of scenarios where this is useful…

• OTP generation

• Push updates

• Price changes

• API notifications and callbacks

• Amazon SES notifications/callbacks

• Chat/messaging services

• Browser notifications