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Amazon SNS

Score8 out of 10

47 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Amazon SNS?

Amazon Web Services offers the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) which provides pub/sub messaging and push notifications to iOS and Android devices. It is meant to operate in a microservices architecture and which can support event-driven contingencies and support the decoupling of applications.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Amazon SNS.
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SNS provides simple notification solutions, integrations with key SES and Cloudwatch use cases

Anthony Aziz
VP Engineering in Engineering at Full Circle TMS (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently we use SNS to deliver notifications across our infrastructure, including receiving email, email delivery responses, alarm notifications, etc.

Pros

  • Ability to define multiple subscriptions / topics
  • Dynamically subscribe and publish to topics
  • Widely integrated with AWS and third party components

Cons

  • Visibility into delivery, sampling, etc, for troubleshooting

Return on Investment

  • Implement metrics-based operational alarms
  • Manage email delivery metrics and handle them within our application to protect email sender reputation
  • Accept emails from customers and handle directly in custom app functions

Usability

Other Software Used

Datadog, AWS Fargate

Engineer real time event based applications, publish and deliver instant notifications to your subscribers and manage time sensitive events using Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Incentivized
Manu GuptaView profile
Co-founder, Director in Corporate at Aspiring Investments (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Amazon SNS service provides support to a wide variety of needs including critical events notification, monitoring hybrid mobile applications both on ios and android, time-sensitive information updates. We are in the process of scaling our projects to include Amazon SNS in business workflow systems to relay events among apps, move data between data stores or update records in billing systems.

The product is very useful in managing key event notifications. We also plan to use it for our customers to update them about our new features and critical outages. The scope of our use case is both for managing AWS backend events within the organizational workflows and also for notifications to our customers.

Pros

  • Event updates and notifications concerning validation, approval are immediately delivered to relevant system components as well as end-users.
  • Move data between data stores or update records in billing systems
  • SNS is very useful in workflow systems to relay events among distributed applications
  • Event notification, monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates in billing and ledgering systems.
  • Very useful to developers who build applications that rely on real-time events.

Cons

  • Interoperability with other cloud vendors and shared hosting systems
  • Better support and integration with low code/no code platforms to enable developers to integrate faster
  • Ease of developer experience especially in managing real time database events for hybrid mobile and tablet apps
  • Availability of plugins for open source cross platform developer tools like ionic framework.

Most Important Features

  • Flexibility in message delivery over multiple transport protocols
  • Cost effective, pay-as-you-go model with no up-front costs
  • Web-based AWS Management Console offers the simplicity of a point-and-click interface
  • Simple APIs and easy integration
  • Instant message delivery

Return on Investment

  • Easy to bootstrap fresh developers with limited cloud and backend experience
  • Quick deployment is very much possible and we can make customizations easily. Adaptability with ever changing needs of customers is possible.
  • Good solution for interns who build customer applications that rely on real-time events.
  • Event updates and notifications concerning validation, approval are easy to develop

Alternatives Considered

Amazon EventBridge, Azure Notification Hubs and Firebase

Other Software Used

Firebase, EtherCalc, GitHub, Bitbucket

Inexpensive Transactional SMS

Incentivized
Scott Brown
Software Engineer in Information Technology at Okinus (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SNS to send out emails and text notifications. The majority of our uses are to send out One Time Passwords through our online application process. SNS is an inexpensive and safe way to send out a high volume of these codes. SNS was also very straightforward to implement.

Pros

  • Sending Text messages
  • Ensuring test message compliance with 10 digit numbers.

Cons

  • Notifying us when certain providers are down.

Most Important Features

  • Transactional messaging for our OTPs

Return on Investment

  • SNS is a lot cheaper per message costs than the competitors. It's allowed us to save money on our OTP transactions.
  • SNS is a very stable platform. When we have issues with our OTP, it's almost never an issue with the actual service uptime.

Alternatives Considered

Clickatell

Other Software Used

PhpStorm, Laravel PHP Framework

Amazon SNS is like the Central Nervous System to our Technology Stack

Incentivized
Bob SmithView profile
Co-Founder, President, CTO in Corporate at Infofree Sales Leads | Business Lists | Person Search & CRM101 (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • View and manage topics.
  • Allow product inter-communication.
  • Easy to get up and running.
  • Bridge between different technologies/stacks used.

Cons

  • Reporting available is good, but there are always room to grow.
  • Analytics on message origin would be beneficial.
  • Message size limit increase.

Return on Investment

  • Amazon SNS allowed us to quickly get started.
  • We have never had an issue with service availability of SNS.
  • There is a cost, but the positives are worth it.

Alternatives Considered

PagerDuty

Usability

Amazon SNS from an Amazon Expert

Incentivized
Jackson Gordon
Account Manager at Five Star Commerce (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Filtration of information.
  • Streamlines messages and important information.
  • Order information notification typically for clients sold products.

Cons

  • At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying.
  • Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen.
  • You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it.

Return on Investment

  • Quick action on internal failures to reduce sales loss
  • Quick information on ways to improve sales practice
  • Relevant informaiton on site and its uses

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Usability

Other Software Used

Upwork, ClickUp, Harvest, Clockify, Google Authenticator, LastPass for Business, Splashtop Business Access, Google Drive, Google Hangouts Meet, Zoom, Join.me, Amazon Advertising, Skype