Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Features and Functionality Flashcards
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Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
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What is the format of an Amazon SNS topic?
Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
Topic names are limited to 256 characters. Alphanumeric characters plus hyphens (-) and underscores (_) are allowed. Topic names must be unique within an AWS account. After you delete a topic, you can reuse the topic name. When a topic is created, Amazon SNS will assign a unique ARN (Amazon Resource Name) to the topic, which will include the service name (SNS), region, AWS ID of the user and the topic name. The ARN will be returned as part of the API call to create the topic. Whenever a publisher or subscriber needs to perform any action on the topic, they should reference the unique topic ARN.
The following is the ARN for a topic named “mytopic” created by a user with the AWS account ID “123456789012” and hosted in the US East region:
arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:1234567890123456:mytopic Note: Users should NOT attempt to build the topic ARN from its separate components – they should always use the name returned from the API call to create the topic.
What are the available operations for Amazon SNS and who can perform these operations?
Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
Amazon SNS provides a set of simple APIs to enable event notifications for topic owners, subscribers and publishers.
Owner operations:
CreateTopic – Create a new topic.
DeleteTopic – Delete a previously created topic.
ListTopics – List of topics owned by a particular user (AWS ID).
ListSubscriptionsByTopic – List of subscriptions for a particular topic
SetTopicAttributes – Set/modify topic attributes, including setting and modifying publisher/subscriber permissions, transports supported, etc.
GetTopicAttributes – Get/view existing attributes of a topic
AddPermission – Grant access to selected users for the specified actions
RemovePermission – Remove permissions for selected users for the specified actions
Subscriber operations:
Subscribe – Register a new subscription on a particular topic, which will generate a confirmation message from Amazon SNS
ConfirmSubscription – Respond to a subscription confirmation message, confirming the subscription request to receive notifications from the subscribed topic
UnSubscribe – Cancel a previously registered subscription
ListSubscriptions – List subscriptions owned by a particular user (AWS ID)
Publisher operations:
Publish: Publish a new message to the topic.
Why are there two different APIs to list subscriptions?
Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
The two APIs to list subscriptions perform different functions and return different results:
The ListSubscriptionsByTopic API allows a topic owner to see the list of all subscribers actively registered to a topic.
The ListSubscriptions API allows a user to get a list of all their active subscriptions (to one or more topics).
What are the different delivery formats/transports for receiving notifications?
Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
In order for customers to have broad flexibility of delivery mechanisms, Amazon SNS supports notifications over multiple transport protocols. Customers can select one the following transports as part of the subscription requests:
“HTTP”, “HTTPS” – Subscribers specify a URL as part of the subscription registration; notifications will be delivered through an HTTP POST to the specified URL.
“Email”, “Email-JSON” – Messages are sent to registered addresses as email. Email-JSON sends notifications as a JSON object, while Email sends text-based email.
“SQS” – Users can specify an SQS standard queue as the endpoint; Amazon SNS will enqueue a notification message to the specified queue (which subscribers can then process using SQS APIs such as ReceiveMessage, DeleteMessage, etc.). Note that FIFO queues are not currently supported.
“SMS” – Messages are sent to registered phone numbers as SMS text messages.
Can topic owners control the transports that are allowed on topics they create/own?
Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
Topic owners can configure specific transports on their topics by setting the appropriate permissions through access control policies.
How does an owner set Access Control policies?
Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
Please refer to the Amazon SNS Getting Started Guide for an overview of setting access control policies.
Can a single topic support subscriptions over multiple protocols/transports?
Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
Subscribers to an Amazon SNS topic can receive notifications on any transport supported by the topic. A topic can support subscriptions and notification deliveries over multiple transports.
Can subscribers selectively receive only a subset of messages published to a topic?
Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
Yes, you can use message filtering on Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to build simpler and more streamlined pub/sub architectures. Message filtering enables Amazon SNS topic subscribers to selectively receive only a subset of the messages they are interested in, as opposed to receiving all messages published to a topic. For more details, try our 10-minute tutorial, Filter Messages Published to Topics, or see the documentation.
Can Amazon SNS be used with other AWS services?
Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
Amazon SNS can be used with other AWS services such as Amazon SQS, Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Here is an example of how an order processing workflow system uses Amazon SNS with Amazon EC2, SQS, and SimpleDB. In this workflow system, messages are sent between application components whenever a transaction occurs or an order advances through the order processing pipeline. When a customer initially places an order, the transaction is first recorded in Amazon SimpleDB and an application running on Amazon EC2 forwards the order request to a payment processor which debits the customer’s credit card or bank account. Once approved, an order confirmation message is published to an Amazon SNS topic. In this case, the topic has various subscribers over Email/HTTP – merchant, customer and supply chain partners – and notifications sent by Amazon SNS for that topic can instantly update all of them that payment processing was successful. Notifications can also be used to orchestrate an order processing system running on EC2, where notifications sent over HTTP can trigger real-time processing in related components such as an inventory system or a shipping service. By integrating Amazon SNS with Amazon SQS, all notifications delivered are also persisted in an Amazon SQS queue where they are processed by an auditing application at a future time.
Is Amazon SNS available in all regions where AWS services are available?
Features and Functionality
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Application Integration
Please refer to the AWS Regions and Endpoints section of the AWS documentation for the most up to date information on Amazon SNS availability.
