Simple Notification Service: A worthy choice
October 17, 2018
Simple Notification Service: A worthy choice
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Amazon SNS is an incredibly useful service. In my previous organizations, we used it as an easy way to get a notification service set up with our users without having to manage any servers or additional resources. The messages are incredibly inexpensive and cost close to nothing. I only know that it was being used in my sector for sure, however, I am confident that it was being used all across the organization as well. It was the only available service that could solve our email/SMS notification needs with available scaling, cost savings, and ease of use for our employees and customers.
- Super simple setup and deployment. You can have a new service set up within minutes and in a serverless environment as well
- Well documented and incredibly easy to use. There are available APIs in almost every relevant language and are all well documented by AWS. Getting any team up to date on their new Notification architecture shouldn't take longer than a day.
- Being managed by AWS themselves makes the service highly available in every possible way. Your SNS deployment is almost guaranteed to never go down without you ever lifting a finger to make it so.
- The AWS website UI could use some definite improvement. The website itself is very clunky and hard to navigate and always seems to have the wrong information in the wrong places. It is a monstrous task trying to make a website as complicated as AWS look simple and easy to navigate but even with some minor improvements it would become much more user and beginner friendly.
- Troubleshooting can be very difficult when encountering an issue with SNS and often many AWS services. By having all of your infrastructure in the cloud, it makes troubleshooting networking problems quite complicated. On top of this, aws provides little return information when a message fails to send, leaving a lot of guesswork to be done on your part to fix the issue.
- Positive from the cost savings of the service itself
- Positive from the labor savings from both the ease of setup and learning curve of the programmers
SNS is much more customizable compared to SES and allows for many more delivery methods. While it is better for email-based notification services, not being able to send notifications via SMS limits your app functionality considerably. Being able to switch message delivery types is an invaluable tool for any application deployment.