As discussed briefly earlier, SNS is a managed web service that you, as an end user, can leverage to send messages to various subscribing endpoints. SNS works in a publisher–subscriber or producer and consumer model, where producers create and send messages to a particular topic, which is in turn consumed by one or more subscribers over a supported set of protocols. At the time of writing this book, SNS supports HTTP, HTTPS, email, push notifications in the form of SMS, as well as AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS, as the preferred modes of subscribers.
SNS is a really simple and yet extremely useful service that you can use for a variety of purposes, the most common being pushing notifications or system alerts to cloud administrators whenever a particular event occurs. We have been using SNS throughout this book for this same purpose; however, there are many more features and use cases that SNS can be leveraged for. For example, you can use...