What Is Amazon SNS? (All You Need to Know)

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is an AWS service that simplifies the process of creating, managing, and sending alerts. If you're just getting started with AWS and are curious about Amazon SNS, this post will fill you in on all you need to know.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a significant component of Amazon’s business portfolio. You can think of AWS as a collection of several cloud-based services. Amazon's most lucrative business unit offers cloud services like servers, storage, networking, remote access, email, mobile app creation, and security.

One of the many products offered by AWS is Amazon SNS —a managed service that provides message delivery from publishers to subscribers. Essentially, you can use this product to send out managed notifications to intended recipients.

What Is Amazon SNS？

Amazon SNS is a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective messaging service that can be used for both application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communications. With Amazon SNS, you can utilize its messaging capabilities without having to worry about upfront fees, minimum usage commitments, or long-term obligations.

The service operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing you to only pay for what you actually use. Additionally, Amazon SNS offers a range of features for message publishing, batching, filtering, and increased durability to enhance your messaging experience.

What Are The Components Of Amazon SNS？

As aforementioned, Amazon SNS is an AWS product, you’ll therefore need to get your feet wet with AWS first before diving deeper into Amazon SNS. The first concept you need to understand before using the product is the distinction between a Producer (Publisher) and a Consumer (Subscriber)—messages are sent from producers to consumers.

In order to have an asynchronous conversation with their audience, publishers send messages to a topic. A topic serves as both an entry point and a line of communication. In the same way you can subscribe to a Youtube channel and receive channel notifications if an endpoint type is supported, a client can subscribe to an SNS topic and start receiving messages.

Some of the supported endpoints include SMS, AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, email, HTTP, and mobile push alerts. Now that you have an idea of what Amazon SNS is, let's look at some of the capabilities and features of the product.

Features and Capabilities Of Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS is quite versatile and can be used in many ways; the following are some of the product’s features and capabilities.

• Application-To-Application Messaging

Various AWS services, such as Amazon SQS queues, Amazon SQS queues, HTTPS endpoints, Lambda functions, and AWS Event Fork Pipelines, can all participate as subscribers in a two-way messaging system.

• Application To Person Notification

Using channels like mobile apps, mobile phone numbers, and email addresses, push notifications can be sent from an application directly to a user. Amazon SNS allows you to send phone SMS messages that support this feature.

Rather than sending a text to an individual number, you can instead send it to a group of people who have subscribed to a particular topic. AWS allows you to customize your SMS delivery choices to fit your use cases and budget. Messages, for instance, can be set to prioritize either low-cost or guaranteed delivery.

• Standard And FIFO Topics

If you want to avoid duplicate messages, have them arrive in the correct sequence, and set up message groups, then a FIFO topic is what you need. A FIFO topic can only be subscribed to by other FIFO queues in Amazon Simple Queue Service.

These services can be used as one unified, fully-managed FIFO service, ideal for distributed applications requiring transactional data consistency in real-time. If the timing of message delivery or avoiding duplicate messages is not crucial, then a standard topic should be used. All of the available transport protocols can subscribe to the same topic.

• Message Durability

For message persistence, Amazon SNS employs several strategies. One of these is storing messages in multiple data centers all around the world. Amazon SNS will automatically implement a retry policy when an endpoint becomes unavailable. Additionally, you can use a dead-letter queue to store messages that aren't delivered before the delivery retry policy timeout is reached.

• Message Security

One of the selling points of Amazon SNS is its security. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) subjects can have their contents encrypted on the server using encryption keys generated by Amazon Key Management Service. You can use encrypted topics to store private information using server-side encryption (SSE). Secure Message Exchange uses AWS Key Management Service-managed keys to encrypt messages sent to Amazon SNS topics (AWS KMS).

Amazon SNS Pricing

Amazon SNS is a paid service where you only pay for what you use. The good thing about the service is that it comes at no upfront costs. Your bill will reflect the volume of messages sent, notifications sent, and API calls made to manage your channels, topics, and subscribers. It's essential to keep in mind that Delivery costs change based on the destination. You will be charged differently depending on whether you use Standard Topics or FIFO Topics. Let's have a closer look at each.

• Standard Topic

For Standard subjects, the primary cost drivers are the volume of API requests and the number of messages delivered each month. Additionally, the cost will depend on the region to which you are sending the notifications. For instance, in the Ohio region, the first one million Amazon SNS requests per month are free, and each further one million costs $0.50.

• FIFO Topics

The pricing of a FIFO topic is primarily determined by three variables: the total number of messages published, the total number of messages subscribed to, and the total quantity of data in the payload for the messages sent. There is a $0.30 charge for 1,000,000 calls made to the Publish and Publish Batch API and $0.017 for each GB of payload data. On the other hand, subscription messages cost $0.01 for every million and $0.001 for every GB of payload data.

Bottom Line

Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) is an AWS product used to send and manage notifications. Two parties are involved in the process—The producer and the Consumer. Producers need to send the message to a topic to have asynchronous communication with the consumer. Regarding pricing, the main factors to consider are the topics used. Depending on your use case, you can choose between a Standard topic and a FIFI topic. The size of your messages' payloads is another aspect that will affect your final bill.

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