

Amazon introduces new service: Simple Notification Service - ryandvm
http://aws.amazon.com/sns/

======
ryandvm
One of Amazon's SNS devs seems to be hanging around on reddit willing to
answer questions about it.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bnn60/amazon_in...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bnn60/amazon_introduces_new_web_service_simple/)

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jasonlbaptiste
The email notification part is what I find to be very interesting. I haven't
looked at how in-depth you can configure things with deliverability / message
customization, but I'd have to believe it's very robust. If it can do what I
think it does, did it just make SendGrid dead in the water?

ie- 2 dollars per 100k messages via Amazon vs. 80 per month for 50k messages
on sendgrid.

~~~
terrellm
Seeing as how EC2 IP addresses are being blocked by many spam blocking
services*, I don't know that I'd want to depend on Amazon to ensure my emails
are delivered. Sure I realize it's probably a different block of IPs, but I
wonder how long before those get blocked too.

Source: <https://community.engineyard.com/faqs/questions/ssmtp>

~~~
guelo
Why couldn't SendGrid get blocked?

~~~
dotBen
Let's say SendGrid did get blocked, despite their work to make sure they don't
(they have more of vested interest than Amazon do).

If it was costing them serious business, presumably they would change their
IPs, etc. Where as Amazon are unlikely to because sending email isn't their
core business.

~~~
lyime
Hard to say. Amazon takes all their AWS products pretty seriously. I am sure
they have thought through email deliverability. I wouldn't discount their
solution just because their EC2 IPs have been blocked in the past for mass
email.

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subbu
_no charges for the first 100,000 Notifications over HTTP and no charges for
the first 1,000 Notifications over Email_

Their free notification limit is quite generous.

~~~
juvenn
No, they'll bill you the data (e.g. messages you post to topics) transferred
in from this June, then your first hits will not be free anymore. To quote
from the page:

 _Data Transfer In will be $0.10 per GB after June 30, 2010._

~~~
ScottWhigham
Seems generous to me even with that info. I don't know the packet size/charge
per notification but I have trouble imagining the scenario in which one goes
from 0 notifications (today), to using up 100,000 free notifications, and then
to using up so many notifications you care/notice $0.10 per GB - all by
June/July

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rgrieselhuber
I can't tell you how long I've wanted something like this.

~~~
PanMan
Can you tell us why? What's that makes this so useful? I can't really come up
with many good use-cases for it...

~~~
stanleydrew
Well for one, I think you could effectively run a PubSubHubbub server or
subscriber node on top of this.

~~~
sketerpot
I had to google for "PubSubHubbub" because it sounded too ridiculous to exist
in actual, physical reality. But it looks like a pretty cool project.

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blurry
_Future enhancements to Amazon SNS – such as notification delivery over SMS –
will provide more protocol options and additional flexibility to mobile
application developers._

Does anyone have an educated guess as to when the SMS transport option will be
available? How long does it usually take Amazon to add a promised feature?

~~~
d2viant
I'd say a couple months at least. If you look at past and present future
enhancements listed for their other services (such as RDS replication, Windows
reserved pricing, etc.) they've all spent many months in development after the
point at which they were mentioned to customers.

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nopal
This will be great once they add SMS as a transport (listed under upcoming
features).

~~~
dryicerx
In the mean time, you can ask your users the phone number+provider, and use
the providers own email to SMS gateways. [http://www.mutube.com/projects/open-
email-to-sms/gateway-lis...](http://www.mutube.com/projects/open-email-to-
sms/gateway-list/)

~~~
johns
Unfortunately with that system when people change carriers they have to
remember to notify you. (full disclosure: I work for Twilio but I have been
trying different SMS techniques for years so this comment stems from that
experience)

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mumrah
The ability to subscribe to notifications using SQS is a very cool feature.
Adding the ability to listen for things is really the linchpin of asynchronous
architecture (in my mind). This sure beats polling a queue.

~~~
charlesju
From my understanding you still need to pool the SQS.

This new SNS service allows an application to push messages to various
subscribers of a topic. Thus, if your SQS was subscribed to this topic, you
could push a message to the SQS every time some action happens.

Then on the flip-side your SQS would still need to be processed by an EC2
server that polls the SQS.

From Amazon's FAQ:

“SQS” – Users can specify an SQS 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.)

The caveat here is of course if you have one of your end points be a HTTP/JSON
API call and the EC2 server that is processing your SQS has a web server on it
that will use the HTTP to trigger the polling process. But even in this
situation, you're still doing a pull to dequeue the SQS.

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jbyers
Read all the way to the bottom. A big caveat for now:

The following limitations are currently in place during the Amazon SNS beta:
One hundred (100) topics per AWS account

~~~
lux
The requirement of publishing to a topic and not to individuals could be a big
limitation too. I'd love to use a service like this to handle all the one-off
emails (billing receipt, individual notifications) within my web apps that
only send to one person, and I want to use a 3rd party so I'm not supporting
the email delivery side of things (keeping us out of spam boxes), but none of
the email services around seem to offer what's needed for this, including
Amazon SNS...

From my experience, just setting up a secure email server with reverse DNS,
SPF and DKIM, and having a privacy policy that you actually practice, is just
not enough to ensure ongoing reliable delivery rates from your own server.
Doing all that, we would still blast out email invites to ~50-100 people at a
time, and one or two recipients would always find it in their spam box. Not
good. With non-technical users, that became an annoying support problem and
decreased the perception of our reliability/quality in their eyes too.

~~~
lux
I see mention of SendGrid, which looks like it might do this. Didn't see that
in my prior research. Have I found a solution here folks?

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rubyrescue
this is interesting, but I wasn't happy with SQS so i'd be wary before we
started using something like this over a custom notification system on top of
RabbitMQ.

we used SQS for a while but kept having problems with polling - deleted
messages would reappear with alarming regularity (which to be fair is
documented by Amazon as a design tradeoff due to the distributed nature of the
queue) - but it really caused a hassle to build a system that could handle
these duplicate messages, especially when there was a lot of work to be done
per message.

~~~
javery
I had the same problems with SQS and ended up using RabbitMQ and haven't had
any problems. The main issue I saw with SQS was a couple seconds on
unavailability every couple of days, enough that I had to start writing lots
of client code to deal with it. RabbitMQ is rock solid.

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chasingsparks
No more DKIM for me? No more burnt VPS IP's?

~~~
mahmud
Have you heard of Google Apps' Email? the free edition? for up to 100 domains
(IIRC.)

~~~
chasingsparks
I use it for my email. However, if I believe they take issue with sending lots
of automated emails (e.g. signup verifications).

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andr
I would love to see support for HTTP long polling or web sockets, to allow
this to be used for real time web apps.

~~~
franck
My thoughts exactly. This is the one feature that could be very big.

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lux
Looks similar to messagepub.com and their message broadcasting, although with
subscription verification, and groups, but minus twitter, google talk, AIM,
etc. Will be interesting to do a comparison of similar services.

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agbell
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Amazon SNS are both messaging services
within AWS, which provide different benefits for developers. Amazon SNS allows
applications to send time-critical messages to multiple subscribers through a
push mechanism, eliminating the need to periodically check or poll for
updates. Amazon SQS is a message queue service used by distributed
applications to exchange messages through a polling model, and can be used to
decouple sending and receiving components.

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mark_l_watson
Free for the first 100,000 Amazon SNS Requests per month - not bad. Also,
$0.10 per gig transfered seems reasonable.

When Amazon released SQS I thought that everyone would use SQS, but in my
limited experience with a small customer base, SQS is no where near as popular
as using EC2s and S3. Interesting to see in a year how widely used SNS is.

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qjz
I completely block the AWS address space on my servers because it's a major
source of malicious probes and constantly siphons bandwidth at no apparent
benefit to me. It looks like I'll have to consider less draconian measures
now, if this is a source of useful messages and not merely a giant spam
machine.

~~~
ryandvm
Unless you're just operating a personal network, that's a pretty blunt measure
that you ought to revisit.

EC2 is certainly hosting legitimate business customers.

~~~
qjz
I'm just blocking originating connections from AWS on select servers. It's
riskier in theory than in practice, as even the nonmalicious connections don't
add much value. But you're right, I'm revisiting and will probably scale it
back to just block web crawling, as no human activity seems to originate from
that space.

~~~
necrecious
I am using EC2 to proxy web surfing for iPhone users, so I hope not too many
website are blocking all traffic from AWS.

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dotBen
I couldn't see anywhere that the emails would be 'white label' - thus
appropriate to replace SendGrid.

It seems to me to be more geared up for machine-to-machine notificaiton,
although granted that would make email a less efficient way of doing this
instead of http

~~~
franck
I think they are white label since there's no mention of it.

Only the email confirmation is likely to officially come from Amazon.

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kylemathews
What format are they using for the HTTP push notifications? It says in the FAQ
that "Subscribers specify a URL as part of the subscription registration;
notifications will be delivered through an HTTP POST to the specified URL."

Is this PubSubHubBub?

~~~
juvenn
Yeah, in its essence, the data flow is nearly the same as PuSH, that URL is
named as _callback_ in PuSH.

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giardini
How does SNS differ from RSS and Common Alerting Protocol (CAP):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Alerting_Protocol>

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thinkbohemian
This is a great way to send emails, what about receiving them, is there any
option with amazon other than getting an ec2 instance and putting a postfix
server (or other MTA) on it?

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milkshakes
i would love to see this hook into apple's push notification service:

[http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Netw...](http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/CommunicatingWIthAPS/CommunicatingWIthAPS.html)

too bad they don't use webhooks :(

~~~
qwzybug
Urban Airship has a similar service (even priced similarly):
<http://urbanairship.com/> Their focus is specifically mobile apps, & they
have nice sample code for iPhone/Android/Blackberry. Gets spendy faster than
Amazon, but I've used it for personal stuff and it's really easy.

Ex.: I do a lot of database work recently, so when I kick off a 90min query,
at the end I ping them with some JSON and my phone meows. (Meow! Stop
drinking! Your query is done!)

~~~
Splines
I do this with notifo right now. It's quite useful. I've gotten Boxcar and
messagepub to do the same thing for me, but I like notifo's UI.

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trickjarrett
Was I the only one who mistook this for a framework to allow for text-message
notifications?

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dustingetz
google wave (vision), anyone? [http://www.jasonkolb.com/weblog/2009/09/why-
google-wave-is-t...](http://www.jasonkolb.com/weblog/2009/09/why-google-wave-
is-the-coolest-thing-since-sliced-bread.html)

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apower
This is great. Amazon is really putting out some great feature.

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einarvollset
It seems each user can only create 25 topics. That sucks.

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pwim
Perhaps Amazon SNS isn't the best name.

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Sidnicious
This looks like a huge clone of <http://hook.io/>. Granted, Amazon's service
appears to be much farther along, and is likely going to support higher loads,
but the concepts are the same.

~~~
keefe
There's a limited set of ideas that are ready for development at the cusp of
CS at a particular point in time.

