Amazon SNS

Fully managed Pub/Sub service for A2A and A2P messaging

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is Amazon Web Services' fully managed publish/subscribe (pub/sub) messaging service. AWS's own FAQ describes it simply as 'a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud.' SNS was announced on April 7, 2010, as part of AWS, which itself launched in 2006 ('we launched Amazon Web Services in the spring of 2006') as a business of Amazon.com, Inc. SNS was built primarily for application-to-application (A2A) integration — decoupling distributed systems by fanning out events from topics to subscribers such as AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, HTTP/S endpoints, and email. Application-to-person (A2P) SMS was added as a delivery transport in 2011 and later expanded internationally; AWS's SNS product page currently advertises the ability to 'send SMS texts to customers across over 240 countries,' with support for sender IDs, long codes, short codes, toll-free numbers, and 10DLC origination identities. As of November 1, 2024, SMS billing and much of the SMS-specific functionality moved under the AWS End User Messaging umbrella ('Amazon SNS now delivers you SMS messages via AWS End User Messaging'), though SMS can still be published through the SNS API and SNS remains the entry point most developers reach for. SNS is used chiefly by developers and enterprises already building on AWS who want to trigger transactional or alerting SMS programmatically via API/SDK calls authenticated with AWS IAM — it has no visual campaign builder, contact-list manager, or shared inbox, which sharply differentiates it from dedicated A2P SMS marketing platforms built for non-technical marketing teams. New AWS accounts start with a small default SMS spend quota (USD $1.00/month) and must request a quota increase to scale sending. AWS operates an ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) region, but there is no dedicated Australian legal entity, local pricing, or Australia-specific SMS support team for SNS.