Amazon Web Services allow businesses to access some of the most innovative technology systems. That said, AWS promotes more efficient business practices and communication lines.
If you’ve looked into AWS, you may have noticed something called Amazon SNS and asked, what is this service? I was curious about the same thing, so I looked into the matter in greater depth. Here’s everything I discovered about the topic!
What Is Amazon SNS In [currentyear]?
Amazon SNS, Simple Notification Service, is a messaging service that works for A2A and A2P communications as of [currentyear]. With Amazon SNS, there are no upfront fees, minimum usage requirements, or long-term contracts, as you only pay for what you use. Amazon SNS allows for message publishing, batching, filtering, greater durability, and much more.
If you want to learn more about Amazon SNS, the benefits of using the program, and much more, keep on reading. I’ve researched everything you need to know!
What Does Amazon SNS Stand For?
Amazon SNS stands for Simple Notification Service.
That said, Amazon SNS is a messaging service designed to be compatible with application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication.
What Does Application-To-Application Communication Provide?
When a program has A2A functionality like Amazon SNS, it provides topics for push-based, many-to-many messaging between the following applications:
- Distributed systems applications
- Microservices applications
- Event-driven serverless applications
What Is Application-To-Person (A2P) Messaging?
A2P messaging is any kind of message where a person receives a message from an application rather than another person, like in most cases.
Further, A2P messages are typically not expected to receive a reply from the person. For example, A2P messages include the following types of messages:
- Marketing communications
- Appointment reminders
- Chatbots
- Notifications
- One-time passwords
- PIN codes
What Can Amazon SNS Do?
Amazon SNS has several capabilities, but the most desired feature is that you can send messages to numerous subscriber systems when using Amazon SNS topics (or communication channels).
For example, your publisher system can send messages to the following subscriber systems:
- Amazon SQS queries
- AWS Lambda functions
- HTTPS endpoints
- Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
Moreover, Amazon SNS’s A2P capabilities allow you to send messages to users via email, mobile push, and SMS.
What Features Does Amazon SNS Have?
As previously mentioned, Amazon SNS has several features, including message batching, filtering, and durability, to name a few.
Message Publishing And Batching
With Amazon SNS’s message publishing, you can send messages to a communication channel, which then delivers the information to the applications subscribed to said topic.
With that, you can publish one to ten messages per API request.
Also, the service’s message batching feature allows you to choose to combine messages together to reduce costs associated with your Amazon SNS account.
Message Filtering
With message filtering, your subscriber applications can create filters.
Therefore, the applications only receive the notifications they are interested in instead of receiving all the messages published to the topic.
With this feature, you can simplify your architecture as a whole.
Message Durability
Through the use of several mechanisms, Amazon SNS works to provide message durability. With that, published messages are stored across different servers and other data centers.
So, if there isn’t a subscribed endpoint available, Amazon SNS performs a message delivery retry policy.
That said, if there isn’t a viable endpoint, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers programs to ensure messages are sent to durable endpoints.
Additional Amazon SNS Features
Of course, the previously listed features are only a handful of the things Amazon SNS can do. That said, some of the other elements of the service include:
- Message fanout and delivery
- Message privacy
- Message archiving and analytics
- SMS text messages
- Mobile push notifications
- Email notifications
How Much Does Amazon SNS Cost?
One convenient aspect of Amazon SNS is that there are no upfront fees, required minimum commitments, or long-term contractors.
Also, you only pay for what you use when it comes to Amazon SNS, with the monthly fee associated with the type of topic you use.
Moreover, Amazon SNS topics are defined either as Standard topics or FIFO topics.
Additionally, if you want to know how much your Amazon SNS monthly fee will be, you can use the pricing calculator.
Still, it is helpful to know that Amazon SNS topic pricing is based on the following:
- The number of monthly API requests made
- The number of deliveries to endpoints
- The endpoint type
How Do You Get Started With Amazon SNS?
Amazon recommends completing its ten-minute tutorial on Amazon SNS to start. Then, you can begin creating Amazon SNS topics and publishing messages.
How Do You Sign Up For Amazon SNS?
If you want to sign up for Amazon SNS, all you have to do is click on the “Sign up for Amazon SNS” button on the service’s detail page.
But, you will need to have an Amazon Web Services account before you can access Amazon SNS. So, if you don’t already have an AWS account, you will be prompted to create one.
After signing up for Amazon SNS, Amazon recommends reviewing the Getting Started Guide and other documentation.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Amazon SNS?
With Amazon SNS, there are numerous benefits, including the following:
- Instantaneous, push-based delivery (no polling)
- Simple APIs
- Easy integration with applications
- Flexible message delivery over multiple transport protocols
- Cost-effective, pay-as-you-go with no up-front costs
- Web-based AWS Management Console offers the simplicity of a point-and-click interface
To know more, you can also read our posts on what is Amazon workforce staffing, what is Amazon Cognito, and what is Amazon referral fee.
Conclusion
Amazon SNS is a messaging service that works with A2A and A2P communication streams. Also, Amazon SNS is cost-effective because you only pay for the amount of data you use.
Further, using Amazon SNS allows for message batching, filtering, and durability, making it reliable.
