Item: Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a very versatile tool useful for both small and large-scale Amazon estates.
Our first use case was for applications monitoring and system alerts based on notifications triggered by predefined
thresholds. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) sent these notifications to specific users via email. It was
great for our initial foray into DevOps way back in 2010. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is now a lot better and can be used for a variety of use cases – one that we now use very widely is fanout where we use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to replicate Production data into staging and training environments for AI/ML model training.

Pros and Cons

Messaging
Ease of use
Pricing

Troubleshooting

Most Important Features

Ease of use
Scale
Security
Price

Return on Investment

Positive ROI
Time to value
Peace of mind

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), Apache Kafka and Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Amazon’s SNS is incredibly easy to set up compared to the
more powerful, but complex, Kafka flavours.

SNS’s core advantages are –

· no setup/no maintenance

· either a queue (SQS) or a topic (SNS)

· various limitations (on size, how long a message lives, etc)

· limited throughput: you can do batch and concurrent requests, but still
achieving high throughputs would be expensive

· SNS has notifications for email, SMS, SQS, HTTP built-in.

· no "message stream" concept

Overall, it would be the best choice to get into the concepts of Pub/Sub concepts as although it has limitations it can provide significant capabilities and solutions

Key Insights

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?

Yes

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

Yes

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

Yes

Other Software Used

Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Forecast, Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is incredible for setting up monitoring and alerting for your AWS estate when you are starting out. However, it has now grown significantly and is a feature complete messaging platform that can operate securely at scale. We use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) now significantly for clickstream analytics and training AI/ML models via fanout - a method to replicate Production data and send it directly into staging environments where new ML models can get trained.

Overview of Amazon SNS

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)