Amazon Simple Notification Service

A service for distributing events and notifications to multiple destinations.

A Pub/Sub-style notification service. Delivers a single message to multiple subscribers.

• Email notifications
• Fan-out delivery to SQS
• System alert notifications

• A Pub/Sub-style notification service
• Delivers to multiple subscribers
• Combined with SQS for loose coupling

• Use the fan-out pattern to deliver to multiple queues
• Narrow subscribers with filter policies
• Understand retry behavior on delivery failure

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fully managed publish/subscribe (Pub/Sub) messaging service provided by AWS. When a publisher sends a message to a topic, the same message is delivered to all subscribers of that topic. Fan-out delivery, which simultaneously delivers a single message to multiple destinations, is a major role of SNS, and it is used as a foundation for loosely coupling components. Subscriptions (delivery destinations) support a wide range of endpoints. Supported targets include Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions, HTTP/HTTPS endpoints, email, SMS (mobile phone short message), mobile push notifications (Apple, Google, and Amazon push notification services), and AWS Event Fork Pipelines. By using subscription filter policies, each subscriber can receive only messages with specific attributes from those sent to the topic. Typical use cases include email notifications to operations staff from CloudWatch alarms, fan-out patterns that simultaneously deliver messages to multiple SQS queues, asynchronous event linkage between microservices, and push notification delivery to mobile applications. Pricing is composed of publish request counts, delivery notification counts, and data transfer volume, with usage-based rates that differ by delivery protocol (SMS has a higher unit price, while SQS and Lambda delivery have lower unit prices). In CLF-C02, the division of roles between SNS (Pub/Sub, push delivery to multiple subscribers) and SQS (queue-based, with each message consumed by a single subscriber), and the SNS + SQS fan-out configuration, are frequent topics.

• What is Amazon SNS (AWS Official Documentation)
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (AWS Official)

Last updated: 2026-06-01