Simple Notification Service - AWS messaging service for sending notifications to multiple subscribers. Like a broadcast system that can simultaneously send messages to phones, emails, and other applications.
An e-commerce site uses SNS to notify customers via SMS and email when their orders ship.
Amazon SNS is a managed pub/sub notification service that fans out messages from topics to many subscribers (HTTP/S endpoints, SQS, Lambda, email, SMS, mobile push). Comparable services: Azure Event Grid (event routing to handlers), Google Cloud Pub/Sub (messaging pub/sub), and OCI Notifications (topic-based notifications). Exact features differ (e.g., Event Grid is event-centric with rich filtering; Pub/Sub is general-purpose messaging; SNS emphasizes fanout to multiple endpoint types including email/SMS).
Explore real-world architectures from our community that use SNS: