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SNS - A connector service in AWS eco system
October 21, 2019

SNS - A connector service in AWS eco system

Apurv Doshi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

We use SNS to send notifications across services to communicate with each other. We use SNS across all the departments which are consuming AWS. We solve multiple problems through SNS as mentioned below:
  1. To notify the stack holder when build and deployment is completed.
  2. To check and report environment health.
  3. Call consumers when all async producers finish their jobs.
  4. To send Push notifications.
  • It is extremely easy and powerful service to send message across different Amazon services. To create the topic, subscriber and post notification is just natural. It requires almost zero learning curve.
  • It is a managed services. So there is no need to worry about scaling. It can work with extreme heavy volume easily without taking any special care.
  • It allows 256KB for published notification. Also this is divided into 4 chunks of 64 KB. Each 64KB chunk is considered as 1 request and full payload with 256KN is considered as 4 requests. This keeps your bill lower.
  • It does not have sufficient debug options. The only way is to subscribe for email to receive errors.
  • It is difficult to format email. To support dynamic formatting, developer needs to write extra code which can be simplified.
  • We mainly use SNS for async task completion notifications. We notify SQS on completion of some operations via SNS. Since SNS take no charge to deliver notification to SQS, it is a good advantage.
  • Mobile push notifications and HTTPS are relatively cheap but with intense data load, you end up spending lot more money. You need to design your notifications carefully. Email and SMS notifications are expensive.One must need to follow proper strategy to use them.
  • Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and AWS Lambda
We use EC2 instances to train ML model against a heavy volume of data. When the model is trained (i.e. loss reduces to a certain level), we push notification to all the stakeholders to notify them the new model is available. To achieve it, SNS is the most simple and cost effective way.
We have not come across situations where we need support for SNS. However for other AWS services, we have received really good support to solve the issue and to define the architecture.

Do you think Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) again?

Yes

Zoom, Slack, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
When your entire infrastructure is part of Amazon ecosystem, this service will act as a common thread for communication. It provides simple pubsub way to make sure real time notification. It is extremely easy to send notifications via SMS, email and Push Notifications. When async processes are running and you want to notify some other services, this service becomes first choice by default.
The only scenario where SNS is little less appropriate is heavy data volume. Sometimes you may get delayed notification.