An increase in the usage of mobile apps brings forth the need for developers to take more advantage of the opportunity that Push notifications offer. Push notifications have an important role in the process which starts after a user downloads a mobile app. Push notifications that are built correctly and efficiently are noticed to increase the lifespan of mobile apps. They are less intrusive than other forms of customer engagement and can be used to effectively to bring in more traffic and add value for the user by pushing out relevant content.
Push notifications may help to develop a loyalty bond between the mobile user and the app, however, push notification sending plans that are built on the wrong strategies may even cause the user loss. It is essential that this information is useful and engaging if not push notifications can become disturbing and annoying, leading to negative perceptions about your app. To help you choose the right platform, here we present you with a comprehensive guide on a popular Push service: Amazon SNS.
Amazon Simple Notification Service
Amazon’s simple notification services is a simple, highly secure cloud that manages to deliver a message to a large number of clients at a go. The company’s platform enables app owners to send app push notifications to multiple platforms like iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Fire OS using a single API. Among its clients are notable companies such as WunderList, Yelp, Hike Messenger, Yik Yak, etc.
Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) was launched by Amazon in April 2010 to facilitate mobile app developers work and help them to build more sophisticated apps. Amazon SNS works upon its two clients i.e publisher and subscriber. Publishers are the ones who formulate down the messages to communicate to its subscriber over any platform. Subscriber is the one who access the published messages over any given platform they have registered into example (Amazon SQS, HTTP/S, email, SMS, Lambda). It is meant to operate in a microservices architecture and which can support event-driven contingencies and support the decoupling of applications.
It works on the topic keyword algorithm. Publishers actually construct a message rather than putting down email id or any designation to deliver, its topic name is used to deliver to the client. Algorithm matches with the topic name and subscriber enrolled to the push notification will receive it. You can get started with Amazon SNS in an instant by using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS Software Development Kit (SDK).
Highlights include:
- First million of notifications delivery is free, after $.50 / million
- Top-level hardware infrastructure
- Simple APIs and easy integration with mobile applications
- Flexible message delivery over multiple transport protocols
- Inexpensive, pay-as-you-go model with no up-front costs
- Web-based AWS Management Console offers the simplicity of a point-and-click interface.
Amazon SNS Review: Features
- Event-driven computing – amazon SNS services is a cloud platform that provides event-driven services that have native integration with its AWS event sources provided by the publisher.
- Message filtering – filtering services provide you with the power to filter out only those message related topics you are interested in and oppose other topics.
- Message fanout – Fanout provide parallel processing of the messages which replicates the original message and then push to multiple endpoints as well.
- encrypted – all the message used to process is actually secure and encrypted to protect from any third party access.
- mobile notifications – the notification through this service can be sent down to every other platform and you’ll have the option to pinpoint the notification access.
- Privacy – Also you get to access AWS Pvt cloud services which aim to publish the messages privately to your end-user. You need to use a VPN, as AWS has its own service, particularly for this purpose.
Amazon SNS Review: Pricing
Amazon SNS is basically free up to a certain extent, you pay on the basis of the number of deliveries you use.
Also, rates differ from countries and regional areas.
| Endpoint Type | Free Tier | Price |
| Mobile Push Notifications | 1 million | $0.50 per million |
| Worldwide SMS | 100 | Learn more |
| email/email-JSON | 1,000 | $2.00 per 100,000 |
| HTTP/s | 100,000 | $0.60 per million |
| Simple Queue Service (SQS) | No charge for deliveries to SQS Queues. Normal SQS pricing applies. | |
| Lambda functions | No charge for deliveries to Lambda. Normal Lambda pricing applies. |
Amazon SNS Review: Advantages or USPs
- Dynamically scale – scale your workload, taking care for heavy duty workload, monitoring patching moreover designed to handle traffic bursts tasks without any upfront cost.
- Message filtering logic – according to the publisher topic assigned to its service, the message gets filtered out to every endpoint worldwide interested.
- Cross availability – Due to its high coverage area geographically, using this service can prove to be beneficial as messages could be sent to all of its data centers to cover each and every subscriber.
- Privately publish messages – help you to privately publish message by using its private VPN service.
- Subscribing email endpoints to SNS topics and integrating topics with CloudWatch alerts is very easy.
Amazon SNS Review: Limitations
- Confusing UI – for the beginner UI could be a bit confusing to work with.
- Troubleshooting is really difficult due to its complex UI and infrastructure.
- It does not have sufficient debug options. The only way is to subscribe to email to receive errors.
- Testing systems that use SNS end-to-end can be tricky; LocalStack somewhat ameliorates this problem.
- It is difficult to format email. To support dynamic formatting, the developer needs to write extra code which can be simplified.
Amazon SNS Review: Customer Base
Due to its cost-effective services according to region, its customer base is mainly the bigger firms and top players of the IT industry.
Some of the major customer to this service provider is –
WIPRO: The IT company responsible for consulting, It services, IT outsourcing, system integration has around 170,000 clients all over. Wipro generates more than 200,000 tickets for its IT human source department with the use of AWS is efficiency increased by 50%.
FC BARCELONA: This Spanish based football club is amongst the best with its huge fan base. The associate spoke about their massive increase of digital boost over the double of its previous rates.
Amazon SNS Review: Signup Process
Signing up for AWS is really easy.
1. Enter the details
2. Enter down your contact information
3. Amazon has its policy to register your card details and charge where it is necessary.
4. Verification part for confirmation.
5. In the above step, the code is checked and your account is confirmed.
6. Then you are supposed to ask for a plan according to your requirements. You can change it whenever you like. Then you’d have to sign in again.
Make your account and get access to the maximum number of features at readily low rates as compare to other firms.
Amazon SNS Review: Alternatives
- Urban Airship – AI orchestration and services they need to deliver push notifications, emails, SMS, in-app messages, mobile wallet passes and more to exactly the right person
- Catapush – it is a scalable, affordable API responsible for efficient delivery.
- Pushbots – Pushbots can be used to send a message to any mobile platform, directly from your dashboard. Used by companies like Thinkscloud.
- OneSignal – Another alternative for Amazon SNS, totally free platform for mobile and web push notification services.
- ZeroPush – ZeroPush is a tool in the Mobile Push Messaging category. It provides a clean web-friendly API to APNS and GCM for mobile push notifications.
Amazon SNS Review: User Reviews
“Great Small Service for sending notifications
I love how simple the application is to use. You can send notifications to both emails and phone numbers on a subscription or one-time basis. This makes it super easy to send a notification from any program or when any piece of infrastructure is in a dangerous state.
Great tool for alerting you about infrastructure and even programmatic events. Don’t underestimate it’s usefulness once you’ve overcome its rather steep learning curve.
We are using SNS to alert us and our programs to potential issues with our infrastructure. For example whenever one of our databases experiences extremely heavy loads above ninety percent, we have a Cloudwatch Alarm send an SNS notification to AWS Lambda, which runs a query showing us what the command was that caused the heavy processing load. By having this feature, we can optimize our Database design and fix the issues causing queries to take up an exceptionally large amount of compute resources.”
-Dylan Cauwels ( Vice President : Longhorn MakerStudio )
“ When your entire infrastructure is part of Amazon ecosystem, this service will act as a common thread for communication. It provides simple pubsub way to make sure real time notification. It is extremely easy to send notifications via SMS, email and Push Notifications. When async processes are running and you want to notify some other services, this service becomes first choice by default.”
-Apurv Doshi ( Senior Solutions Architect: Infostretch )
Roundup
Amazon Simple Notification Service is a fast, flexible, fully managed push notification service that allows its users to send personalized messages or to fan-out messages to large numbers of recipients. It makes it simple and cost-effective to send push notifications to mobile device users, email recipients or even send messages to other distributed services. Among several other push services, choose Amazon SNS to provide better engagement for your users.