Simple Notification Service

2 min readOct 30, 2023

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed messaging service provided by AWS (Amazon Web Services). It allows you to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. With SNS, you can send individual messages to many subscribers, including distributed systems and services and mobile devices.

Key Features

Topics: A channel for sending messages and subscribing to notifications. A single topic can support deliveries to multiple endpoint types.
Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) Messaging: Subscribers can be loosely coupled to a topic. When a message is published on a topic, Amazon SNS takes care of delivering that message to all subscribers of that topic.
Message Filtering: Allows subscribers to specify a filter policy only to receive a subset of messages published to a topic.
Flexible Delivery Options: Messages can be delivered via various protocols like SMS, email, application endpoints, etc.
High Availability: Operates across multiple regions to ensure reliability.
Message Fan-out: One message can be sent to various recipients in parallel.
Durability: Provides durable storage of all messages that it receives.

Common Use Cases

Application and system alerts
Workflow automation
Content distribution
Real-time notifications for mobile applications
Decoupling microservices

Cost

The cost depends on the number of messages published, the number of deliveries, and other features you use.

Code Example: Publishing a Message (Python)

Here’s a simple Python code snippet that uses the AWS SDK (boto3) to publish a message to an SNS topic.

pythonCopy code

import boto3 # Initialize the SNS client sns_client = boto3.client(‘sns’, region_name=’us-east-1') # Publish a message response = sns_client.publish( TopicArn=’arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:MyTopic’, Message=’Hello, world!’, Subject=’TestSubject’ ) # Print the response print(response)