Amazon SNS (AWS): The Complete Guide for Developers [2025]

Grid Image

Amazon SNS is a fully managed publish/subscribe messaging service offered by AWS. It enables scalable and reliable communication between applications. Key features include message filtering and support for multiple protocols.

Developers utilize Amazon SNS for decoupling microservices and building event-driven architectures. Further exploration of Amazon SNS will reveal its integration capabilities and implementation patterns, providing a thorough understanding of its applications and benefits.

Understanding Amazon SNS

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed publish/subscribe messaging service which enables message delivery between publishers and subscribers, the core concepts involved being topics, subscriptions, and messages.

Architecture in SNS uses a decoupled model; it enables scalability and reliability between systems. Some of the advanced features used by SNS architecture include message filtering and message attributes, which further support customized processing of messages.

Understanding the security and compliance features of SNS, including access controls and encryption, is very important for developers to design and implement secure and reliable messaging systems that meet the requirements of their applications.

What is SNS?

Simple Notification Service, being a fully managed publish/subscribe service, enables message delivery between publishers and subscribers, allowing for loose coupling between systems not directly connected, thus allowing more flexibility and independence in system design.

For developers who are looking to exploit SNS, an aws sns tutorial or an aws sns setup guide can prove very helpful. Developers can leverage SNS for creating scalable and reliable notification systems and focus more on core application development.

SNS supports SMS, email, and HTTP/HTTPS protocols and is very flexible in handling a wide variety of use cases.

Core concepts and architecture

On analysis of the underlying core concepts and architecture of Simple Notification Service, this fully managed publish/subscribe service inherently appears to allow for efficient, reliable, and strongly expressed message delivery for publishers and subscribers, thus allowing for systems not necessarily even directly connected to communicate loosely.

The price for Amazon SNS is based on the number of requests. Therefore, this makes it a cost-friendly approach for developers. SNS vs SQS AWS: SNS should be used where decoupling of microservices is desired, while SQS can be used to queue the tasks.

This architecture allows for scalable and reliable communication, freeing developers to focus on application development.

Message filtering and message attributes

Message filtering and message attributes are an integral part of the Simple Notification Service, thus allowing publishers to categorize and prioritize messages while subscribers can filter out unwanted messages, thereby improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the notification process.

In contrast, SNS is a much more flexible messaging model that enables fan-out messaging patterns. The comparison between sns and sqs shows how it handles multiple subscription protocols, such as HTTP, email, and SMS.

By utilizing message attributes, developers can create targeted notifications, increasing the freedom to design and implement customized messaging solutions that meet specific application requirements.

Security and compliance features

Core to the design and operation of Amazon SNS are security and compliance features incorporated as part of its methods to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of messages being published and subscribed to by clients.

Amazon SNS uses encryption and access controls to ensure secure data transfer. It also has features like identity and access management, which enable safe authentication and authorization of publishers and subscribers.

These security measures allow developers to build reliable and secure applications, protect sensitive information, and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements, thus promoting freedom and flexibility in application development.

Setting Up Amazon SNS

An operational Amazon SNS Installation is not a simple task; it needs a painstaking labor of devising a stepwise configuration guide meant for creating topics, configuring access control and permission, configuring a monitoring and logging rig.

Setting Up Amazon SNS.png

The configuration step must include prudently considering best practices about topic creation, appropriate protocol selection (SMS, email, or HTTP/HTTPS), and subscription filters to ensure directed message delivery.

By putting in place the right guidelines-a decent access control system-the developers can provide a tight and effective working solution with SNS that best meets their application’s messaging needs.

Step-by-step configuration guide

When developers begin using the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for their applications, configuring the service becomes an important step that must be taken with care, keeping in mind various issues: the type of notification protocol needed, the number of subscribers, and the frequency of publishing messages.

  1. Defining topic attributes
  2. Creating subscriptions
  3. Configuring notification protocols
  4. Setting up access controls, they can guarantee seamless communication and flexibility.

Best practices for topic creation

A well-designed topic is essential for effective message propagation and subscription management, thus, it is vital to give careful consideration to several important criteria to ensure seamless communications and flexibility.

They consider factors such as topic naming conventions, access policies, and subscription protocols to guarantee efficient and reliable messaging.

Effective topic creation enables liberated communication between publishers and subscribers, facilitating unrestricted information exchange and promoting autonomy in system design.

Best practices allow developers to create scalable and flexible topics that provide freedom of communication and exchange of data.

Maximized topic performance is not guaranteed.

Access control and permissions

Access control and permissions are very important to Amazon Simple Notification Service, enabling the ability to manage topic subscriptions, publish messages, and interact with other services.

They allow developers to set permissions on SNS resources and guarantee that only approved and recognizable entities may publish messages or subscribe to topics.

The identity and access management policy sets the permissions for Amazon SNS, allowing granular control over access to the resources. In using these features, other software developers may manage SNS resources in a safe and secure manner, while maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of the messaging infrastructure.

This means information is kept in secrecy and only those that are afforded permission may access it, resulting in increased security and reliability in the messaging environment.

Monitoring and logging setup

The last step to configure Amazon SNS is setting up monitoring and logging, where developers configure a framework for tracking and analyzing service activity to identify problem areas and optimize performance.

The setup will give you the logs and metrics to see what is happening with your SNS topics, the delivery of messages, and subscription activity. Developers can use both Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail to monitor SNS resources to help discover any anomalies and troubleshoot problems, ensuring reliable and efficient messaging services.

Monitoring and logging setup is crucial to the ongoing health of any system and its preservation from the burden of technical debt.

Integration Capabilities

Amazon SNS provides extensive integration capabilities, including seamless interactions with various AWS services, such as AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS, which enable developers to build scalable and reliable architectures.

Amazon SNS Integration Capabilities.png

Additionally, Amazon SNS supports third-party integrations, facilitating cross-region message delivery and ensuring that messages are delivered efficiently across different regions and applications.

The service also offers features like dead-letter queues, which allow developers to handle message delivery failures and exceptions in a controlled and efficient manner, thereby ensuring the overall reliability and performance of their applications.

AWS service integrations

AWS offers excellent integration with SNS such that your Lambda function can be triggered from a message published on an SNS topic in a serverless fashion.

It supports integration with SQS messages published on an SNS topic that can be sent to the SQS queue for further processing.

Amazon SNS can also trigger posts of notifications through CloudWatch in conjunction with notification of SNS topic, based on CloudWatch alarms or alarms metrics changes, therefore automating notifications or workflows.

Lambda

As the demand for serverless architectures continues to grow, the integration of AWS Lambda with Amazon SNS has become crucial, enabling developers to trigger Lambda functions in response to SNS notifications, processing events in a fully managed environment, allowing for scalable and reliable systems with native integration.

SQS

Through its seamless integration with other AWS services, SNS facilitates efficient communication between applications, and its compatibility with Simple Queue Service (SQS) enables handling high volumes of messages in a scalable and reliable manner, allowing for flexible and efficient message processing and routing to various endpoints.

CloudWatch

Integration with CloudWatch enables Amazon SNS to leverage monitoring and logging capabilities, tracking SNS metrics like published messages and delivery failures, monitoring performance and reliability of SNS topics and subscriptions, ensuring freedom from operational burdens, with detailed metrics and logging for ideal system management and autonomy.

Third-party integrations

Amazon SNS’s capability to easily integrate with many third-party services is one of the major reasons for its widespread acceptance since this paves the way for developers to leverage the capabilities of different platforms and tools together with the messaging service.

Support for integration with services such as Twilio for SMS and email notifications, as well as Pusher and PubNub for real-time notifications, facilitates that flexibility and modular architecture and allows for the incorporation of specialized services and tools.

These integrations provide a real power to developers in building scalable and reliable applications, thus enhancing the overall functionality and flexibility of Amazon SNS. This brings in the prospect of designing applications unfettered.

Cross-region message delivery

Cross-region messaging capabilities allow Amazon SNS to send notifications among different AWS regions, allowing for a unified messaging framework across large regions.

This enables developers to build scalable and reliable applications that can work smoothly across multiple regions.

Using cross-region message delivery allows developers to make applications that are highly available and responsive anywhere users might be.

This feature is extremely useful for applications with global reach and one that allows for the scalability that permits the user to access services from everywhere in the world.

This enhances the flexibility of the total system.

Dead-letter queues

A key functionality of Amazon SNS is the decoupling of applications and services. Developers frequently use dead-letter queues to capture messages that are unable to be delivered to subscribers; this prevents the loss of such messages and allows them to be processed or analyzed later.

Dead-letter queues provide a fail-safe for undeliverable messages, which developers can investigate to debug their problems. The ability to avoid losing a message is important for reliable communication between applications and services.

Dead-letter queues give the developer a guarantee of the correct handling and processing of messages, so that systems and applications can be kept in good standing. This is an important piece of the jigsaw for scalability and reliability.

Implementation Patterns

Amazon Simple Notification Service is such a service that encompasses various implementation patterns including Message Queuing, Publisher-Subscriber, and Fan-out architectures. This allows for a certain degree of loose coupling between the message producer and the ones consuming it.

Besides, event-driven architecture can use Amazon Simple Notification Service to deliver real-time notifications and event handling by publishing messages to specific topics with multiple endpoints subscribing to them.

The implementation of Message filtering, Error handling patterns, etc., are indispensable in the design of a scalable and reliable system, and with Amazon Simple Notification Service that particular implementation patterns can be supported.

Publisher-Subscriber models

With regards to Amazon SNS, its subscription model, Publisher-Subscriber model, is facilitated through the work of subjects or topics, which provide a logical access point, allowing communication channels for communications to happen in an asynchronous way with the publishers and subscribers.

It enables loose coupling of systems so they can work independently. Publishers can send messages to a topic, which will be received by subscribers. This allows for flexibility as well as scalability.

Distributed message distribution by Amazon SNS allows reliable and efficient communication between different systems.

This architecture is used for a variety of application scenarios, including event-driven architectures, real-time notifications, where a developer may effectively and reliably send messages.

It encourages systems’ autonomy.

Fan-out architectures

Fan-out architectures, which allow a message to be delivered to multiple targets in parallel, form the core of Amazon Simple Notification Service implementation patterns: publishers send messages to a topic, then SNS route these messages to the subscribed endpoints containing AWS Lambda functions, SQS queues, and HTTP(S) endpoints, thereby enabling communication between systems to be efficient and scalable.

This gives systems more freedom and independence to operate while still providing them with supplemental news and enhancing decentralized architecture with value for freedom and flexibility, having them be very good for applications that require real-time notifications and alerts.

Event-driven architectures

As publishers and subscribers interact through a topic, event-driven architectures leverage Amazon SNS to facilitate the exchange of messages between systems, thereby enabling the creation of loosely coupled, scalable, and fault-tolerant applications.

This approach allows for greater flexibility and autonomy among system components. By utilizing Amazon SNS, developers can design systems that respond to events in real-time, enabling more efficient and responsive applications.

Event-driven architectures promote a decentralized and modular design, providing a foundation for building modern, cloud-native applications that prioritize freedom and scalability.

Amazon SNS plays a vital role in this paradigm.

Message filtering patterns

Message filtering patterns in Amazon SNS enable developers to selectively route messages to specific subscribers based on predefined criteria, thereby allowing for more targeted and efficient communication between systems.

This feature provides flexibility and control, enabling developers to customize message delivery according to specific requirements.

By applying filtering patterns, developers can guarantee that messages are delivered to the intended recipients, reducing unnecessary notifications and improving overall system efficiency.

This capability is particularly useful in event-driven architectures, where precise message routing is vital for peak system performance and effectiveness, allowing for greater autonomy and self-determination.

Error handling strategies

For the reliability and message fault tolerance mechanism, proper error handling procedures are useful when developers can notice, diagnose, and recover from errors that occur in any of these stages: message publishing, subscription, and delivery.

Through retry techniques, dead-letter queues, and exception handlers, the users have techniques at their disposal to manage errors and exceptions. Effective error handling strategies also entail monitoring and logging to identify the problem early and ensure seamless communication between the publisher and the subscriber.

Adequate error handling thus allows the user to build robust and scalable systems, and to concentrate on the core application logic. Because of this, error handling is critical.

Serverless Applications with SNS

The utilization of Amazon SNS in serverless architectures enables developers to build scalable and reliable applications with native integration with AWS Lambda and other AWS services.

Serverless Framework integration with SNS allows for streamlined deployment and management of serverless applications, while common patterns and anti-patterns emerge as best practices for optimizing performance and cost in SNS-powered serverless architectures.

SNS in serverless architectures

Because serverless architectures inherently rely on scalable and event-driven designs, Amazon SNS plays a crucial role in facilitating communication between various components of these systems, thereby enabling the creation of highly distributed and decoupled applications.

This allows for greater flexibility and autonomy in system design, enabling developers to focus on writing code without worrying about infrastructure management.

By leveraging SNS, serverless applications can efficiently handle large volumes of messages and notifications, promoting a more liberated and efficient development process.

SNS integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, further enhancing its utility in serverless architectures.

Serverless Framework integration

As serverless applications increasingly rely on event-driven architectures, leveraging the Serverless Framework to integrate Amazon SNS enables developers to create scalable and decoupled systems, wherein SNS topics can be easily configured to trigger AWS Lambda functions, thereby facilitating seamless communication between various components of the application.

This integration promotes flexibility and autonomy, allowing developers to design systems that prioritize freedom and adaptability.

By utilizing the Serverless Framework, developers can efficiently manage SNS topics and subscriptions, ensuring efficient event handling and notification delivery within their serverless applications. This enables efficient event-driven design.

Common patterns and anti-patterns

Serverless applications leveraging Amazon SNS often exhibit specific patterns and anti-patterns, which substantially impact their overall architecture, scalability, and reliability. Developers should recognize these patterns to design efficient systems.

Common patterns include event-driven architectures and fan-out messaging, while anti-patterns include tight coupling and insufficient error handling.

By understanding these patterns, developers can create scalable and reliable serverless applications, leveraging the benefits of Amazon SNS.

This enables them to focus on writing code, rather than managing infrastructure, thereby promoting freedom and flexibility in software development. Effective use of SNS requires careful consideration of these patterns.

Performance optimization

Optimizing performance in serverless applications that leverage Amazon SNS requires careful consideration of several factors, including message size, subscription latency, and throughput.

  1. Monitoring message size to prevent throughput issues
  2. Minimizing subscription latency for real-time notifications
  3. Optimizing topic configuration for efficient message delivery
  4. Implementing efficient retry mechanisms to handle failures, thereby enabling developers to create scalable and reliable serverless applications with Amazon SNS.

Cost optimization strategies

Cost optimization strategies for serverless applications leveraging Amazon SNS involve a multifaceted approach that considers various factors, including message volume, subscription dynamics, and pricing-tier utilization.

  1. Optimizing message size
  2. Minimizing subscription overhead
  3. Leveraging pricing tiers
  4. Implementing efficient publishing to reduce costs and increase freedom in application design.

Advanced Features of Amazon SNS

The advanced features of Amazon SNS allow developers to build reliable and scalable messaging systems; other functions include message durability, which guarantees message persistence in case of system failure; message ordering, which guarantees delivery in a precise order; and message deduplication, which prevents multiple deliveries of the same message.

advanced features of Amazon SNS.png

Additionally, SNS has a retry policy that allows developers to define the behavior when a message fails delivery, as well as message archiving, enabling the storage of some messages for audit and compliance purposes.

Such features are very important as the design and scaling of fault-tolerant applications, and in distributed systems where delivery guarantees can cause issues relative to the data consistency and integrity.

Message durability

A key component of dependable messaging systems is message persistence, and SNS offers a robust and highly accessible messaging infrastructure that ensures messages are not lost in transit.

SNS ensures high availability and fault tolerance by storing published messages redundantly across several servers.

Because of this durability feature, developers can create scalable and dependable apps that provide uninterrupted message delivery to subscribers.

Developers may concentrate on creating their apps with SNS since they can design and implement their systems freely without worrying about message loss or corruption because their messaging infrastructure is stable and dependable.

Message ordering

Messaging systems you can count on, like the one SNS offers, need to be tough and make sure messages arrive in the right order. This keeps events in the right sequence leading to behavior you can predict and rely on.

SNS uses a FIFO system to send messages making sure they go out in the same order they came in. This matters a lot for things like money transfers or processing data in real-time where the order of events is key. We need messages in order to keep data correct and matching up.

Message deduplication

Since data integrity is crucial in distributed systems, ensuring that duplicate messages are treated appropriately is critical to avoid redundant processing and consequent, potential errors.

Amazon SNS is message deduplication enabled that can ensure that every message is processed only once. This functionality is essential in systems where message replication may lead to an incorrect or inconsistent result.

Through the automatic elimination of duplicates, SNS ensures data consistency and reliability, in turn facilitating developers to concentrate on scalable and fault-tolerant applications.

Especially, in the distributed systems, message duplication may happen because of the network failures or other reasons.

Retry policies

When a message cannot be delivered to a subscriber, Amazon SNS employs retry policies to handle the failed delivery attempt, thereby ensuring that the message is not lost and that the system remains resilient in the face of temporary failures or subscriber unavailability.

Retry policies allow developers to configure the timing and frequency of retries, granting them control over message delivery. This feature enables the creation of robust and reliable messaging systems, promoting freedom from concerns about message loss or system failure.

Message archiving

Message archiving represents an advanced feature of Amazon SNS, enabling the storage and preservation of messages for future reference or auditing purposes, thereby complementing the retry policies that guarantee message delivery resilience.

This feature allows developers to retain messages for extended periods, ensuring that critical information is not lost. By archiving messages, developers can maintain a record of all communications, facilitating debugging, auditing, and compliance.

This capability enhances the overall reliability and transparency of Amazon SNS, providing developers with greater control over their messaging infrastructure and enabling them to build more robust and fault-tolerant applications. Archives are securely stored.

Comparison and Decision Making

When evaluating Amazon SNS, developers must consider its positioning relative to other messaging services, including Amazon SQS, Amazon Event Bridge, and Apache Kafka, in order to determine the most suitable solution for their specific use cases.

The decision to use SNS versus these alternatives depends on factors such as the required level of scalability, the type of messaging pattern, and the need for features like fan-out messaging or support for multiple subscription protocols.

SNS vs SQS

As developers design and implement distributed systems, they often encounter the need to choose between Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for messaging and communication purposes, since both services provide a means of decoupling applications and enabling asynchronous communication, albeit with distinct design principles and use cases.

Service Use Case
SNS Fan-out messaging
SQS Message queuing
SNS Event notifications
SQS Job processing

SNS vs Event Bridge

Developers designing distributed systems often encounter the need to evaluate multiple messaging services, having previously considered the distinctions between Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for their specific use cases.

Service Description
SNS Decouples applications
Event Bridge Handles events
SNS Supports fan-out
Event Bridge Supports event routing
SNS Fully managed service

SNS vs Kafka

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Apache Kafka are two distinct messaging services that cater to different use cases, with SNS being a fully managed pub/sub service, whereas Kafka is an open-source stream processing platform.

Service Use Case Scalability
SNS Decoupling microservices High
Kafka Stream processing High
SNS Real-time notifications Medium
Kafka Event-driven systems High
SNS Fan-out messaging Medium

They differ in architecture and application, offering unique benefits for specific needs, providing freedom to choose the best fit.

When to choose SNS?

The decision to utilize Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) as a messaging solution depends on various factors, including the specific requirements of the application, the desired scalability, and the need for a fully managed service.

Developers consider SNS when they require a scalable and reliable messaging system that can handle a large volume of messages. SNS is chosen for its ability to decouple applications, provide real-time notifications, and support multiple protocols.

Its integration with other AWS services, such as Lambda and SQS, also makes it an attractive option for developers seeking a seamless and efficient messaging solution.

Operations and Maintenance

For an optimal operation and maintenance of amazon Simple Notification Service, certain factors such as monitoring, troubleshooting, systems scaling and a performance guarantee practices must be in place to ensure maximum system functionality and reliability.

In order to fine-tune the performance along with optimizing costs, developers will need to deploy different approaches based on use cases with regards to the SNS Managed Service model, especially given the resource provisioning and consumption aspects.

Monitoring best practices

It goes without saying that keeping track of Amazon SNS is vital for ensuring the performance and reliability of services that depend on it. With the help of monitoring, developers are able to analyze crucial metrics like message delivery rates and the number of subscriptions received.

Amazon CloudWatch offers logs and metrics for SNS, helping developers to track issues and monitor the service. Developers are able to configure alarms and messages which makes it easier to solve issues and ensure the application runs without problems.

As a result, developers are able to channel their energy towards the invention and development of new features rather than carrying out maintenance tasks which leads to a greater efficiency, reliability and speed of application deployment. Metrics are available

Scaling considerations

It is important to consider scaling as more applications focusing on Amazon SNS are created in order to ensure proper communication between systems and services, as it might lead to bottlenecks and poor performance of the system.

Amazon SNS automatically scales and can ingest and serve a large number of messages and subscriptions without any additional infrastructure. This allows developers to concentrate on building applications without having to be concerned about the underlying messaging infrastructure.

The use of Amazon SNS guarantees that applications will continue to be scalable, reliable, and performant with an increasing number of users and messages. This is the prime reason why many developers prefer to use Amazon SNS.

Cost optimization

Amazon SNS operates with minimal overhead costs and with an accurate view of its price model based on the number of requests, SMS messages, emails, and HTTP(S) calls, enabling the developer to calculate the correct expenditures and thereby save money.

By using the free tier and monitoring usage, developers can minimize costs. The cost of publish actions and data transfer can be reduced by optimizing payload size and using AWS services efficiently.

Effective cost optimization allows developers to fully exploit the efficiencies of Amazon SNS while being in control of costs to ensure freedom to focus on application development.

Performance tuning

The performance tuning of Amazon SNS is important to ensure ideal delivery of notifications, and this can be achieved by the careful evaluation and adjustment of a number of parameters, such as message size, subscription latency, and throughput, to minimize delay and maximize efficiency.

These parameters are evaluated to enable developers to optimize the performance of their SNS topics and subscriptions. This ensures that notifications are delivered reliably and in a timely manner, which is critical for many applications.

This ensures no delays or errors that will give the system a good user experience, further enhancing its overall freedom and scalability.

Real-world Use Cases

Amazon SNS is used in many real-world applications, including microservices communication, where it allows for asynchronous message exchange between loosely coupled services, thereby improving scalability and reliability.

Moreover, SNS is used for mobile push notifications, as well as for email and SMS delivery, making it possible to have targeted and personalized communication with users, supporting application alerts, and cross-account messaging.

It makes the service capable of dealing with a broad range of use cases in terms of messaging and hence is versatile for developers in building scalable and reliable applications integrated with other AWS services, like AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS.

Microservices communication

Microservices architecture is increasingly being adopted by organizations to develop complex, scalable applications, and reliable communication between these microservices is crucial for ensuring seamless functionality. Amazon SNS enables efficient communication between microservices, allowing them to operate independently.

By using SNS topics, microservices can publish and subscribe to messages, facilitating loose coupling and fault tolerance. This architecture promotes flexibility, scalability, and reliability, enabling developers to build complex systems with ease.

SNS provides a managed service for message delivery, ensuring that messages are delivered reliably and efficiently, and supporting various protocols such as SMS, email, and HTTP/HTTPS.

Mobile push notifications

Mobile push notifications are one of the primary use cases for Amazon SNS, allowing developers to send targeted, personalized messages to mobile devices, thereby enhancing user engagement and retention.

This ability increases flexibility and provides more autonomy while designing applications and frees developers up to create an experience that might be unique, because through using Amazon SNS, developers may easily distribute a notification to most mobile platforms so that unrestricted communication is facilitated among applications and between applications and the users.

This functionality supports innovation in applications that are user-centric, freedom-oriented, and accessible. The notification service of Amazon SNS deals with efficient and reliable delivery of notifications.

Email and SMS delivery

As organizations increasingly rely on digital communication channels to interact with their audiences, the ability to deliver targeted notifications via email and SMS has become a crucial aspect of their engagement strategies.

Amazon SNS enables the delivery of notifications to users via email and SMS, facilitating real-time communication. This feature is particularly useful for sending alerts, notifications, and updates to users, promoting timely engagement and interaction.

Application alerts

The implementation of application alerts is critical to the timely communication and notification of events within an application, thereby allowing developers to design and deploy systems that can effectively notify users of pertinent information, such as system failures, updates, or other significant events, which is especially important in distributed systems where several components interact and rely on each other to function correctly.

Amazon SNS helps to make an application alert, and via that, developers can send notifications to users about events in applications, creating scalability, reliability, and real-time communication inside that system which enhances the overall efficiency as well as user experience.

Cross-account messaging

Cross-account messaging represents a critical functionality in distributed systems where different parts or applications potentially under different AWS accounts need to exchange information fluently, and Amazon SNS supports this function by allowing publishers and subscribers to communicate across the account boundaries which would allow system designers to add greater flexibility and scalability.

This capability is extremely helpful in a microservices architecture, where various services are hosted on different accounts. Amazon SNS ensures the communication between those services is secured and reliable; loose coupling and autonomy are enhanced.

With cross-account messaging, developers can create more flexible and scalable systems.

Amazon SNS Pricing

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed messaging service for both application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication.

With SNS, you can send notifications to mobile devices, email addresses, and other AWS services like SQS and Lambda. Understanding the pricing model is crucial for effectively managing your cloud costs. Here’s a detailed breakdown of Amazon SNS pricing.

Key Pricing Factors

Amazon SNS pricing is based on the pay-as-you-go model. There are no upfront fees, minimum commitments, or long-term contracts. You are charged at the end of the month based on your usage. The key factors that influence your SNS bill are:

  • Topic Type: Standard or FIFO (First-In-First-Out)
  • API Requests: The number of requests made to the SNS service.
  • Notification Deliveries: The number of notifications sent to various endpoints.
  • Payload Size: The size of the data being transmitted.
  • Data Transfer: The amount of data transferred in and out of Amazon SNS.
  • Optional Features: Message Filtering, Message Archiving & Replay, and Message Data Protection

Standard Topics Pricing

Standard topics are the default topic type and are suitable for high-throughput, best-effort message delivery.

API Requests

  • Free Tier: The first 1 million Amazon SNS requests per month are free.
  • Beyond Free Tier: $0.50 per 1 million requests thereafter.

Important Notes:

  • Standard topic requests include publishes, batch publishes, topic owner operations, and subscription owner operations.
  • Each 64KB chunk of published data is billed as 1 request. For example, a single publish with a 256KB payload is billed as four requests.

Notification Deliveries

Notification delivery costs vary based on the endpoint type.

Region: US East (Ohio)

Endpoint Type Free Tier Price
Mobile Push Notifications 1 million notifications \$0.50 per million notifications
Email/Email-JSON 1,000 notifications \$2.00 per 100,000 notifications
HTTP/s 100,000 notifications \$0.60 per million notifications
Simple Queue Service (SQS) N/A No charge for deliveries to SQS Queues. Standard SQS pricing applies. Data transfer charges apply between Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS.
AWS Lambda N/A No charge for deliveries to Lambda. Standard Lambda pricing applies. Data transfer charges apply between Amazon SNS and Lambda.
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose N/A \$0.19 per million notifications Standard Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose pricing applies. Data transfer charges apply between SNS and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.

Important Notes:

  • With the exception of SMS messages, each 64KB chunk of delivered data is billed as 1 delivery. For example, a single notification with a 256KB payload is billed as four deliveries.

FIFO Topics Pricing

FIFO (First-In-First-Out) topics guarantee message ordering and delivery.

API Requests & Payload Data

Region: US East (Ohio)

  • Publish and publish batch API requests: $0.30 per 1 million
  • Publish and publish batch API requests: $0.017 per GB of payload data
  • Subscription messages: $0.01 per 1 million
  • Subscription messages: $0.001 per GB of payload data
  • Topic owner and subscription owner API requests are charged as Standard API requests, as detailed in the Standard topic pricing section.

Important Notes:

  • Each message from 1KB to 256KB is billed as one message. Any message smaller than 1KB is rounded up to 1KB.
  • Subscription messages are calculated by multiplying the number of published messages and the number of subscriptions. Both filtered and delivered messages count towards the number of subscription messages.

Data Transfer Pricing

Data transfer costs apply when data moves in and out of Amazon SNS.

Region: US East (Ohio)

Data Transfer Type Pricing
Data Transfer IN \$0.00 per GB
Data Transfer OUT First 9.999 TB / Month: \$0.09 per GB
Next 40 TB / Month: \$0.085 per GB
Next 100 TB / Month: \$0.07 per GB
Greater than 150 TB / Month: \$0.05 per GB
For Data Transfer exceeding 500TB/Month please Contact Us

Important Notes:

  • Data transferred into Amazon SNS is free of charge.
  • Amazon SNS does not charge for per-message notification delivery when delivering messages to Amazon SQS and AWS Lambda, but does charge for the amount of data transferred from Amazon SNS to Amazon SQS or AWS Lambda.
  • Data transferred between Amazon SNS and Amazon EC2 within a single region is free of charge. Data transferred between Amazon SNS and Amazon EC2 in different regions will be charged at Internet Data Transfer rates on both sides of the transfer.
  • New AWS customers receive free 15 GB of data transfer out each month aggregated across all AWS services for one year.
  • Data transfer out rate tiers aggregate outbound data transfer across Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon RDS, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Storage Gateway, and Amazon VPC.

Optional Features Pricing

Amazon SNS offers additional features with associated costs.

Message Filtering

  • Attribute-based message filtering: Free.
  • Payload-based message filtering: $0.09 per GB of scanned payload data. Each outbound message scanned will be billed for a minimum of 1 KB of scanning.

Message Archiving & Replay

  • Archive processing: $0.10 per GB of stored payload data.
  • In-place storage of payload data: $0.023 per GB-Month
  • Any data that is archived will be billed for a minimum of 1 day of storage and message replay is billed at the existing FIFO API Requests and Payload data rates.

Message Data Protection

  • Publish and delivery message scanning and protecting (blocked or de-identified): $0.08 per GB of payload data
  • Audit reporting: $0.19 per GB of audit reporting data generated *Each message that is scanned and protected (blocked or de-identified) will be billed for a minimum of 1KB of message scanning.

Worldwide SMS

Amazon SNS also offers scalable SMS (text) messaging to 200+ countries. The price for sending SMS messages varies by destination country. In some cases, the price also includes a telecom carrier fee for the destination phone number.

For some countries, to successfully send SMS messages, you are required to purchase and use dedicated origination identities. Starting November 1, 2024, charges for SMS services will appear under AWS End User Messaging on your AWS bill.

There will be no changes to pricing as part of this change. To learn more about the price of sending SMS and the price of owning and operating with an origination identity, visit the Amazon SNS SMS pricing page.

FAQs About Amazon SNS

What messaging mechanisms does SNS use?

Because Amazon SNS is a managed publish/subscribe service, it utilizes various messaging mechanisms to facilitate communication between publishers and subscribers, including support for multiple protocols such as SMS, email, and HTTP/HTTPS, which enables the service to transmit notifications to a diverse range of endpoints, including AWS Lambda functions, SQS queues, and webhooks.

This flexibility allows developers to design scalable and reliable systems, enabling free communication between applications and services. SNS supports multiple channels, providing a flexible solution for broadcasting messages, and decoupling applications and services with built-in security and delivery features, ensuring efficient communication.

Is SNS a message broker?

The classification of SNS as a message broker is a subject of consideration, given its functionality as a managed publish/subscribe service that enables decoupled communication between applications and services. They utilize SNS to facilitate message exchange, promoting loose coupling and scalability. Although SNS shares some characteristics with traditional message brokers, its architecture and design differentiate it. SNS provides a flexible, reliable, and cost-effective solution for broadcasting messages, making it an attractive option for developers seeking freedom in their application design. Its features and functionality support various use cases, including decoupling microservices and distributed systems.

How secure are my topics?

Security of Amazon SNS topics is guaranteed through various measures, including access controls, encryption, and authentication mechanisms.

These measures guarantee that topics are protected from unauthorized access and data breaches. Amazon SNS uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access to topics, allowing developers to define fine-grained permissions.

Additionally, Amazon SNS supports TLS encryption for messaging, guaranteeing that data in transit remains confidential.

These security features provide a robust foundation for developers to build secure and reliable applications using Amazon SNS, giving them the freedom to focus on their core business logic. Topics are therefore secure.

Can I send SMS globally with SNS?

Amazon SNS supports sending SMS messages globally, leveraging its integration with various telecommunications providers to facilitate message delivery across different regions and countries.

This capability enables developers to reach a broader audience, uninhibited by geographical constraints. By utilizing SNS, developers can send SMS messages to subscribers worldwide, promoting freedom of communication and interaction.

The service handles message delivery, ensuring reliable and efficient transmission of messages to intended recipients, regardless of location.

This feature is particularly useful for applications requiring global reach and accessibility, allowing developers to focus on creating innovative solutions without worrying about message delivery logistics.

How does SNS integrate with other services?

Integration with other services is a key aspect of SNS, enabling developers to leverage the capabilities of multiple AWS services to build robust and scalable applications. SNS integrates seamlessly with AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, and other services, allowing for flexible and reliable message delivery. This integration enables developers to decouple applications and services, improving scalability and reliability. By leveraging SNS with other AWS services, developers can create complex workflows and architectures, freeing them to focus on building innovative applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. This freedom enables developers to create scalable and reliable systems.

Conclusion

While complexity and uncertainty can plague application development, Amazon SNS offers a beacon of simplicity and reliability, juxtaposing the challenges of scalable communication with a straightforward, managed solution, thereby streamlining the process of building robust and efficient systems that thrive in dynamic environments.

Your Digital Journey deserves a great story.

Build one with us.

Cookies Icon

These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with this website and allow us to remember you. We use this information to improve and customize your browsing experience, as well as for analytics.

If you decline, your information won’t be tracked when you visit this website. A single cookie will be used in your browser to remember your preference.

Talk to us