Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fully managed service that provides message delivery from publishers (producers) to subscribers (consumers). Publishers communicate asynchronously with subscribers by sending messages to a topic, which is a logical access point and communication channel.
How it works
In SNS, publishers send messages to a topic, which acts as a communication channel. The topic acts as a logical access point, ensuring messages are delivered to multiple subscribers across different platforms.
Subscribers to an SNS topic can receive messages through different endpoints, depending on their use case, such as:
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Amazon SQS
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Lambda
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HTTP(S) endpoints
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Email
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Mobile push notifications
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Mobile text messages (SMS)
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Amazon Data Firehose
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Service providers (For example, Datadog, MongoDB, Splunk)
SNS supports both Application-to-Application (A2A) and Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging, giving flexibility to send messages between different applications or directly to mobile phones, email addresses, and more.
Accessing Amazon SNS
You can access and manage Amazon SNS through the console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs, depending on your preferred method of interaction. The console offers a graphical interface for basic tasks, while the AWS CLI and SDKs provide advanced configuration and automation capabilities for more complex use cases.
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The Amazon SNS console
provides a convenient user interface for creating topics and subscriptions, sending and receiving messages, and monitoring events and logs. -
The AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) gives you direct access to the Amazon SNS API for advanced configuration and automation use cases. For more information, see Using Amazon SNS with the AWS CLI.
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AWS provides SDKs in various languages. For more information, see SDKs and Toolkits
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Common Amazon SNS scenarios
Use these common Amazon SNS scenarios to implement scalable, event-driven architectures and ensure reliable, real-time communication between applications and users.
Application integration
The Fanout scenario is when a message published to an SNS topic is replicated and pushed to multiple endpoints, such as Firehose delivery streams, Amazon SQS queues, HTTP(S) endpoints, and Lambda functions. This allows for parallel asynchronous processing.
For example, you can develop an application that publishes a message to an SNS topic whenever an order is placed for a product. Then, SQS queues that are subscribed to the SNS topic receive identical notifications for the new order. An Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) server instance attached to one of the SQS queues can handle the processing or fulfillment of the order. And you can attach another Amazon EC2 server instance to a data warehouse for analysis of all orders received.
You can also use fanout to replicate data sent to your production environment with your test environment. Expanding upon the previous example, you can subscribe another SQS queue to the same SNS topic for new incoming orders. Then, by attaching this new SQS queue to your test environment, you can continue to improve and test your application using data received from your production environment.
Important
Make sure that you consider data privacy and security before you send any production data to your test environment.
For more information, see the following resources:
Application alerts
Application and system alerts are notifications that are triggered by predefined thresholds. Amazon SNS can send these notifications to specified users via SMS and email. For example, you can receive immediate notification when an event occurs, such as a specific change to your Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group, a new file uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket, or a metric threshold breached in Amazon CloudWatch. For more information, see Setting up Amazon SNS notifications in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.
User notifications
Amazon SNS can send push email messages and text messages (SMS messages) to individuals or groups. For example, you could send e-commerce order confirmations as user notifications. For more information about using Amazon SNS to send SMS messages, see Mobile text messaging with Amazon SNS.
Mobile push notifications
Mobile push notifications enable you to send messages directly to mobile apps. For example, you can use Amazon SNS to send update notifications to an app. The notification message can include a link to download and install the update. For more information about using Amazon SNS to send push notification messages, see Sending mobile push notifications with Amazon SNS.
Pricing for Amazon SNS
Amazon SNS has no upfront costs. You pay based on the number of messages that you publish,
the number of notifications that you deliver, and any additional API calls for managing
topics and subscriptions. Delivery pricing varies by endpoint type. You can get started
for free with the Amazon SNS free tier. For information, see Worldwide SMS Pricing
