Common Amazon SNS scenarios - Amazon Simple Notification Service
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Common Amazon SNS scenarios

Use these common Amazon SNS scenarios to implement scalable, event-driven architectures and ensure reliable, real-time communication between applications and users.

Application integration

The Fanout scenario is when a message published to an SNS topic is replicated and pushed to multiple endpoints, such as Firehose delivery streams, Amazon SQS queues, HTTP(S) endpoints, and Lambda functions. This allows for parallel asynchronous processing.

For example, you can develop an application that publishes a message to an SNS topic whenever an order is placed for a product. Then, SQS queues that are subscribed to the SNS topic receive identical notifications for the new order. An Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) server instance attached to one of the SQS queues can handle the processing or fulfillment of the order. And you can attach another Amazon EC2 server instance to a data warehouse for analysis of all orders received.

A fanout scenario in Amazon SNS, where a single message from a publisher is sent to an Amazon SNS topic and then replicated to multiple endpoints, such as Amazon SQS queues. Each Amazon SQS queue forwards the message to an Amazon EC2 instance—one handling order processing and another performing data analysis, demonstrating parallel, asynchronous message delivery for event-driven applications.

You can also use fanout to replicate data sent to your production environment with your test environment. Expanding upon the previous example, you can subscribe another SQS queue to the same SNS topic for new incoming orders. Then, by attaching this new SQS queue to your test environment, you can continue to improve and test your application using data received from your production environment.

Important

Make sure that you consider data privacy and security before you send any production data to your test environment.

For more information, see the following resources:

Application alerts

Application and system alerts are notifications that are triggered by predefined thresholds. Amazon SNS can send these notifications to specified users via SMS and email. For example, you can receive immediate notification when an event occurs, such as a specific change to your Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group, a new file uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket, or a metric threshold breached in Amazon CloudWatch. For more information, see Setting up Amazon SNS notifications in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

User notifications

Amazon SNS can send push email messages and text messages (SMS messages) to individuals or groups. For example, you could send e-commerce order confirmations as user notifications. For more information about using Amazon SNS to send SMS messages, see Mobile text messaging with Amazon SNS.

Mobile push notifications

Mobile push notifications enable you to send messages directly to mobile apps. For example, you can use Amazon SNS to send update notifications to an app. The notification message can include a link to download and install the update. For more information about using Amazon SNS to send push notification messages, see Sending mobile push notifications with Amazon SNS.