Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Amazon has packed a box full of services and covered nearly every aspect in making cloud a smooth experience for developers to put up exceedingly operational and structurally complex applications on AWS. Large numbers of cloud-based systems feel the dire need of or dependency on sending out emails on a subscription basis to end users. But it is unfortunate that the internet today is brimming with spammers who refuse to stop sending requests and retarded emails from servers with objectionable SPF configuration.

Taking care of the above mentioned issues, AWS publicized an exceptionally great service known as Simple Notification Service (SNS), designed to the needs of genuine notification delivery.

What is Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)?

The Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) has made it straightforward and trouble-free for you to construct and put together an application in its own way.

Amazon SNS is a speedy, adaptable, flexible, entirely commanded and managed push messaging service that allows you without any difficulty to set up, operate and send notifications to all your subscribers. It brings in the simple and cost-effective push notification service to Apple, Google, Fire OS, and Windows devices even, including all the Android devices in China with Baidu Cloud Push. It can also be used to push notifications to internet connected with all distributed services and smart devices.

It is capable of creating topics, subscribe to topics and even publish topics in an exceedingly scalable, flexible and beneficial manner. By means of Amazon SNS, you can direct event driven messages from your applications to your users. In order to bar and avoid any sort of message loss, all the messages broadcasted across the multiple availability zones to Amazon SNS are stored constantly.

Let’s deep dive into the block displayed in the figure:

Topics: These are the access points or named groups of events for each identifying a specific subject, content or event type. Every single topic carries along a Unique Identifier (UI) that helps in identifying the SNS endpoint for publishing and subscribing.
Owners: Owners are those who create topics and have a complete admittance and access to the topic.
Subscribers: These are the clients usually the end-users, servers, applications or other devices that desire to receive notifications on particular topics of their interest.
Publishers: They are responsible for sending messages to topics. Now SNS matches up the topic with the list of subscribers interested in the topic and distributes the message to each one of them.

Features and Benefits:

Amazon SNS has come up with sufficiently great benefits over the complications of developing custom messaging resolutions in support of a system that demands to be supervised, managed and maintained on site. Following are some of the key benefits and features of Amazon SNS.

Reliable: Whenever Amazon SNS streams inside Amazon’s verified network infrastructure and data centers, all topics will be available each time applications calls for them. All messages broadcasted to Amazon SNS are stocked redundantly throughout numerous servers and data centers in order to prevent message loss.
Scalable: Amazon SNS is modeled to encounter the demand of most needy and demanding applications which permit event driven limitless amount of messages at any time.
Simple: For the majority number of cases the developer just by using only three API’S, can get started with the Amazon SNS which are: Create Topic, Subscriber and Publish. To provide you with intuitive functionality additional APIs are also made accessible.
Flexible: With Amazon SNS, applications as well as end-users on different devices are able to receive notifications with the help of Mobile Push notification (Apple, Google and Kindle Fire Devices), Email/Email-JSON, HTTP/HTTPS, SMS or Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues.
Secure: Amazon SNS is a secure service and makes sure that topics and messages are secure from any unauthorized access. All the Topic holders have a full authority of setting policies for each topic to put limit on who can publish or subscribe to a topic and can even make sure of the encryption via marking that the delivery procedure ought to be in HTTPS.
Inexpensive: Pay-as-you-go method helps in saving a lot of money of Amazon SNS customers. There are no beforehand fees or commitments. It only charges you per-request for the messages, notification delivery and transfer fees that are sent through Amazon SNS.

Amazon Simple Notification Service also supports SMS (Simple Messaging Service)

Amazon SNS leaves no means of notification untouched and comes with SMS feature to subscribe a phone number via an SNS topic. Notifications can directly be addressed as text messages to cell phones, Smartphone as well as on any other SMS-enabled device. Amazon CloudWatch users who are actually responsible for monitoring and controlling their applications that are running on AWS are capable of receiving the timely updates for actions of interest or alarms as they set. Content delivery is also possible to the mobile device through email to the existing Amazon SNS users. Developers can combine mobile applications in conjunction with Amazon SNS to not only send messages but even take delivery of notifications over SMS.

Here’s a figure to better explain how Amazon SNS supports SMS

Pricing:

For Amazon SNS usage you can pay-as-you-go and have no upfront costs. You pay money according to the number of notifications that you are publishing and delivering. You even have to pay if you use additional APIs for managing topics and subscriptions. Price of delivering these notifications varies according to the endpoint type.

Below are the tables that will provide you with full details:

Publishers:

Currently, Amazon SNS only permits maximum limit of 256 KB for published messages. Each 64KB block of published data is billed as 1 request.

Fig: 3

Notification Deliveries:

Fig: 4

Data Transfer: Data transfer ‘IN’ is for $0.000 per GB.

Below is the pricing table for Data transfer ‘OUT’:

Fig: 5

Conclusion:

Amazon SNS is designed to use with other Amazon Web Services such as Amazon SQS and EC2. For example, applications which are running in EC2 have the capability of publishing event/information updates to Amazon SNS and transfer them immediately to all other end-users. In addition to this the subscriber can also choose and select Amazon SQS as a delivery protocol that delivers notifications to multiple SQS queues in parallel format keeping in mind the perseverance of messages and a formal assurance that the messages would be delivered. If you are an Amazon SNS user then use must enable this service to your mobile devices and experience its benefits.