Notes on: AWS Essentials: 7) SNS

Just a place to put some notes on the “AWS Essentials” course from https://linuxacademy.com

7) Simple Notification Service (SNS)

7.1) SNS Basics

SNS = An AWS service that allows you to automate the sending of email or text message notifications, based on events that happen in your AWS account.

In Amazon SNS, there are two types of clients:

- Publishers (producers): Communicate asynchronously with subscribers by producing and sending a message to a topic.

- Subscribers (consumers): Consume/receive the message/notification over one of the supported protocols.

SNS Basic Components:

- Topics: How you label and group different endpoints that you send messages to

- Subscribers: The endpoints that a topic sends messages to.

- Publishers: The human/alarm/event that gives SNS the message that needs to be sent.

Pricing/Cost Overview

https://aws.amazon.com/sns/pricing/

Free Tier use is available for SNS.

Charged on:

(1) Publishers: Number of SNS requests

(2) Notification Deliveries: Number of subscribers the message is sent to

(3) Data Transfer in/out of SNS

7.2) Using SNS

Image: AWS Console > Services > Messagging: Simple Notification Service

Steps:

1) Create a Topic

2) Add Subscriptions

3) Publish to the Topic

Note: For SMS and email endpoints, the subscriber MUST authorize the subscription to receive the message sent by the topic (Email: The subscriber clicks the “Confirm subscription” link in the email titled ‘AWS Notification - Subscription Confirmation’ from ‘{Display name}’ (no-reply@sns.amazonaws.com).

Image: Creating a Topic

Image: Creating an email Subscription

Image: Other Subscription Protocol Options

Note: SMS is only available in certain regions (see here)

Image: Publish to topic (manual button)

7.3) Quiz: SNS Essentials

Q: What are the three main components of SNS?

A: Topics, subscriber and publishers.

T: Subscribers can consist of HTTP, SMS and email endpoints.

T: SNS allows you to automate the sending of email and text messages, based on events that happen in your AWS account.

T: SNS stands for Simple Notification Service.

Q: What are two primary use cases of SNS?

A1: To notify the AWS account owner when current monthly billings reach a certain amount.

A2: To alert a system admin of an EC2 failure.