Amazon SNS: Simple Notification Service Tutorial

Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) is a messaging service that enables you to send notifications to your subscribers or end-users through email, SMS, Amazon SQS, HTTP or HTTPS endpoints. It is a flexible and fully managed service that allows you to send messages to multiple recipients using various message protocols. This tutorial will give you a brief introduction to Amazon SNS and help you understand how to use it effectively.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, you need the following:

• An AWS account
• Basic knowledge of AWS SNS concepts

Creating an SNS Topic

The first thing you need to do is create an SNS topic. Follow the steps below:

1. Login to the AWS Management Console and navigate to SNS service.
2. Select the “Topics” menu item on the left and click the “Create new topic” button.
3. Provide a name and display name for your topic. SNS will use the name as an Amazon Resource Name (ARN) for your topic after you create it. You can also provide a display name for your topic so that you can easily understand the purpose of the topic in the future, and an optional policy to specify access control permissions.
4. Click “Create topic” to create your topic. Your topic will appear on the Topics page with its ARN.

Subscribing to an SNS Topic

After you create a topic, you need to subscribe endpoints to it, such as email addresses, phone numbers or AWS Lambda functions. Follow the steps below:

1. In the SNS console, select the topic you just created.
2. Select the “Create subscription” button, choose a protocol and provide an endpoint address.
3. Click “Create subscription” to subscribe the endpoint to your topic. You will receive a message asking you to confirm your subscription for most protocols.

Publishing Messages to an SNS Topic

You can use the SNS console or an AWS SDK to publish a message to your SNS topic. Follow the steps below to publish a message in the SNS console:

1. In the SNS console, select the topic you want to publish a message to.
2. Enter a message into the message box, then select “Publish message”.
3. After you publish a message, all subscribers to the topic will receive the message through their subscribed endpoint.

Conclusion

Amazon SNS is a reliable and highly scalable notification service that can help you to send notifications to a large number of endpoints using various messaging protocols. In this tutorial, you learned how to create an SNS topic, subscribe endpoints to it, and publish a message to the topic.