AWS SNS
Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service. A single SNS publish can fan out to multiple subscribers — SQS queues, Lambda functions, HTTP endpoints, or email — simultaneously. We design SNS topic architectures with correct subscription filter policies so each subscriber receives only the messages it needs to process.
Capabilities
What we build with SNS
Pub/sub · One-to-many
Fan-out to Multiple Consumers
One SNS publish delivers to multiple SQS queues simultaneously, allowing independent consumers to process the same event without the publisher knowing about each consumer.
Service integration
Cross-Service Event Notification
SNS as the event bus between decoupled services in an application. Services publish domain events to SNS topics; interested services subscribe and process asynchronously.
Subscription filter policies
Message Filtering
SNS subscription filter policies that route messages to the correct subscriber based on message attributes, so each SQS queue or Lambda only receives the specific event types it handles.
Alerting
CloudWatch Alarm Notifications
SNS topics as the notification target for CloudWatch alarms, with subscriptions to email, PagerDuty, Slack webhooks, or Lambda functions for alert handling.
Ordered pub/sub
FIFO Topics
SNS FIFO topics for ordered fan-out when downstream consumers require messages in the same order they were published, paired with SQS FIFO queues as subscribers.
Multi-account
Cross-Account Delivery
SNS topic policies configured for cross-account delivery, allowing a central event bus account to publish to subscriber resources in multiple AWS accounts.
Our approach
SNS and SQS work together
SNS alone delivers to subscribers in real time but does not retain messages if a subscriber is unavailable. Pairing SNS with SQS queues as subscribers gives you fan-out with durable message retention. Each SQS queue gets its own copy of every message, with its own processing concurrency and its own DLQ.
Filter policies reduce processing cost
Without filter policies, every subscriber receives every message on the topic and must evaluate whether to process it. Filter policies push that evaluation to SNS so that irrelevant messages never reach the subscriber. We design filter policies based on the message attribute schema before writing the first subscription.
Topic naming and ownership
SNS topics are long-lived resources shared across many services. Clear naming conventions, consistent tagging, and explicit ownership in documentation prevent the situation where nobody knows whether a topic is still in use or safe to modify.
Defined as infrastructure code
SNS topics, subscription policies, access policies, and subscription configurations are defined in Terraform so that the complete messaging topology is documented, reviewable, and reproducible.
All engineering work is done by US-based engineers. We do not offshore any development or architecture work.
Part of our serverless practice
FAQ
Common questions
Virginia · United States
Designing an SNS fan-out architecture?
Reach out and we will discuss topic design, subscription strategy, and filter policy configuration before any work begins.