Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a managed service that provides message delivery from publishers to subscribers (also known as producers and consumers). Publishers communicate asynchronously with subscribers by sending messages to a topic, which is a logical access point and communication channel. Clients can subscribe to the SNS topic and receive published messages using a supported endpoint type, such as Amazon Data Firehose, Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, HTTP, email, mobile push notifications, and mobile text messages (SMS).
Amazon SNS is used for building and integrating loosely-coupled, distributed applications.
SNS provides instantaneous, push-based delivery (no polling).
SNS concepts:
Topics – how you label and group different endpoints that you send messages to.
Subscriptions – the endpoints that a topic sends messages to.
Publishers – the person/alarm/event that gives SNS the message that needs to be sent.
Amazon SNS provides the following features and capabilities:
Application-to-application messaging
Application-to-application messaging supports subscribers such as Amazon Data Firehose delivery streams, Lambda functions, Amazon SQS queues, HTTP/S endpoints, and AWS Event Fork Pipelines. For more information, see
Application-to-person notifications provide user notifications to subscribers such as mobile applications, mobile phone numbers, and email addresses. For more information, see
Use a FIFO topic to ensure strict message ordering, to define message groups, and to prevent message duplication. You can use both FIFO and standard queues to subscribe to a FIFO topic. For more information, see
Use a standard topic when message delivery order and possible message duplication are not critical. All of the supported delivery protocols can subscribe to a standard topic.
Message durability
Amazon SNS uses a number of strategies that work together to provide message durability:
Published messages are stored across multiple, geographically separated servers and data centers.
If a subscribed endpoint isn't available, Amazon SNS runs a
, which allows you to send notifications to analytics endpoints such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, Amazon Redshift tables, and more. Additionally, Amazon SNS FIFO topics support message archiving and replay as a no-code, in-place message archive that lets topic owners store (or archive) messages within their topic. Topic subscribers can then retrieve (or replay) the archived messages back to a subscribed endpoint. For more, see
By default, each subscriber receives every message published to the topic. To receive a subset of the messages, a subscriber must assign a filter policy to the topic subscription. A subscriber can also define the filter policy scope to enable payload-based or attribute-based filtering. The default value for the filter policy scope is MessageAttributes. When the incoming message attributes match the filter policy attributes, the message is delivered to the subscribed endpoint. Otherwise, the message is filtered out. When the filter policy scope is MessageBody, filter policy attributes are matched against the payload. For more information, see
Server-side encryption protects the contents of messages that are stored in Amazon SNS topics, using encryption keys provided by AWS KMS. For more information, see
Amazon SNS
