What is AWS SNS?
AWS SNS, or Amazon Simple Notification Service, is a fully managed publish-subscribe messaging service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows users to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. With AWS SNS, you can fan out messages to a large number of subscribers, including distributed systems and services, as well as email and SMS recipients.
How does AWS SNS work
AWS SNS functions by organizing applications into topics, which are communication channels for sending messages and subscribing to notifications. Once a topic is created, publishers send messages to the topics, and all subscribers to those topics receive every message published. Subscribing can be in various forms, from a simple SMS message or email alert to triggering Lambda functions or forwarding the message to an HTTP endpoint.
Using AWS SNS provides various benefits. It facilitates the transmission of a high volume of messages in parallel, making it ideal for applications that need to send identical messages to multiple recipients. It is easy to set up, operate, and reliably send notifications to a broad range of recipients. AWS SNS also allows you to simplify your codebase and reduce the complexity of your architecture by offloading the messaging functionality to SNS.
Use Cases for AWS SNS
AWS SNS finds its use in several scenarios. It is integral in microservices architecture, where it can decouple service components and asynchronously communicate between them. It's also used widely in serverless applications, triggering AWS Lambda functions based on certain events. Besides, system administrators leverage SNS for sending system alerts, allowing rapid dissemination of critical information.
AWS SNS provides push notification services in mobile applications, facilitating developers to send in-app messages, SMS, or mobile push notifications. SNS is also used with distributed data stores like Amazon DynamoDB to send table updates to subscribing services. AWS SNS is a backbone in many system architectures, ensuring efficient, resilient, and scalable message delivery.
