Introduction to Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)

In modern cloud architecture, applications are decoupled into smaller, independent building blocks that are easier to develop, deploy and maintain. A Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) messaging provider makes it easy to build highly functional and architecturally complex applications.

Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub): Pub/Sub is a messaging pattern where senders of messages, called publishers, do not program the messages to be sent directly to specific receivers, called subscribers, but instead keep them in intermediary message broker/channels without knowledge of which subscribers will use them. Similarly, subscribers only subscribe to messages that are of interest, without knowledge of which publishers.

AWS SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service. Amazon SNS offers several benefits for building and integrating loosely-coupled, distributed applications:

1. Push-based delivery (no polling)
2. Simple APIs and easy integration with applications
3. Flexible message delivery over multiple transport protocols
4. Inexpensive, pay-as-you-go model with no up-front costs
5. Web-based AWS Management Console offers the simplicity of a point-and-click interface