Features and capabilities - Amazon Simple Notification Service
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Features and capabilities

Amazon SNS provides the following features and capabilities:

  • Application-to-application messaging

    Application-to-application messaging supports subscribers such as Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery streams, Lambda functions, Amazon SQS queues, HTTP/S endpoints, and Amazon Event Fork Pipelines. For more information, see Using Amazon SNS for application-to-application (A2A) messaging.

  • Application-to-person notifications

    Application-to-person notifications provide user notifications to subscribers such as mobile applications, mobile phone numbers, and email addresses. For more information, see Using Amazon SNS for application-to-person (A2P) messaging.

  • Standard and FIFO topics

    Use a FIFO topic to ensure strict message ordering, to define message groups, and to prevent message duplication. Only Amazon SQS FIFO queues can subscribe to a FIFO topic. For more information, see Message ordering and deduplication (FIFO topics).

    Use a standard topic when message delivery order and possible message duplication are not critical. All of the supported delivery protocols can subscribe to a standard topic.

  • Message durability

    Amazon SNS uses a number of strategies that work together to provide message durability:

    • Published messages are stored across multiple, geographically separated servers and data centers.

    • If a subscribed endpoint isn't available, Amazon SNS runs a delivery retry policy.

    • To preserve any messages that aren't delivered before the delivery retry policy ends, you can create a dead-letter queue.

  • Message archiving and analytics

    You can subscribe Kinesis Data Firehose delivery streams to SNS topics, which allow you to send notifications to additional archiving and analytics endpoints such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, Amazon Redshift tables, and more.

  • Message attributes

    Message attributes let you provide any arbitrary metadata about the message. Amazon SNS message attributes.

  • Message filtering

    By default, each subscriber receives every message published to the topic. To receive a subset of the messages, a subscriber must assign a filter policy to the topic subscription. A subscriber can also define the filter policy scope to enable payload-based or attribute-based filtering. The default value for the filter policy scope is MessageAttributes. When the incoming message attributes match the filter policy attributes, the message is delivered to the subscribed endpoint. Otherwise, the message is filtered out. When the filter policy scope is MessageBody, filter policy attributes are matched against the payload. For more information, see Amazon SNS message filtering.

  • Message security

    Server-side encryption protects the contents of messages that are stored in Amazon SNS topics, using encryption keys provided by Amazon KMS. For more information, see Encryption at rest.

    You can also establish a private connection between Amazon SNS and your virtual private cloud (VPC). for more information, see Internetwork traffic privacy.