Amazon Simple Notification (SNS) is secure, highly available, fully managed messaging service. Its also a web server service which coordinates and manages the delivery or sending of the messages to the subscribing endpoints.
In SNS, there are two types of clients 1. Publisher 2. Subscriber also called as Producer and Consumers. The publisher communicates with Subscriber by producing and sending a message through topic which is a logical access point in the communication that is used to send message from publisher to multiple subscriber endpoints . Subscribers are basically the endpoint which receive the message or notification through various protocol such as Amazon SQS, Lambda, Email, Message, HTTP/HTTPs etc.
The topic in SNS is a push base service which helps to send a message instead of storing it in the communication medium by pushing it immediately to the target.
Amazon SNS lets you to configure the policy while crating topic to control access by defining the policy that determines which publisher and subscriber can communicate to that topic. A publisher sends a message to a topic and SNS matches the topic to the list of subscribers who have subscribed to that topic and delivers the message to all subscriber’s endpoint.
Amazon SNS works on System-to-System messaging and User notifications basis. The System-to-System is useful for microservices, distributed and serverless applications whereas the other one is useful for sending text message to mobile phones, plain-text to email address.
The advantage of using SNS are of following\
Secure – Amazon SNS lets you to define policy to your Topic that restricts who could publish and subscribe to a topic. It also helps to encrypt your message at rest using AWS KMS.
Scalable – Its scale your application when required by patching, provisioning additional resource and monitoring it. So its also called as a fully managed service.
Durability – AWS SNS provides high availability and durability by storing your data across multiple availability zones in your region.
Message filtering – Amazon SNS helps in simplifying messaging architecture by filtering logic from subscriber system and message routing logic from publisher system. With this, the subscriber receives only the message which is required out of all the messages are sent to topic from publisher.
Please comment below if you have any questions related to this article.