sns_skill

Overview

This skill provides programmatic control of AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) for pub/sub messaging, mobile push, and notification workflows. It helps create and manage topics, subscriptions, message filtering, and publishing patterns using Python (boto3) and CLI examples. Use it to implement fan-out, FIFO ordering, mobile push, and reliable cross-service notifications.

How this skill works

The skill exposes operations to create and configure SNS topics (standard and FIFO), manage subscriptions across protocols (Lambda, SQS, HTTP/S, email, SMS, mobile application), and publish messages with attributes for filtering. It includes patterns for fan-out to multiple SQS queues, setting subscription filter policies, adding Lambda invoke permissions, and configuring delivery/retry policies and encryption. It provides concrete CLI and boto3 examples for each task.

When to use it

• Broadcast events to multiple consumers (fan-out)
• Deliver notifications to users via email, SMS, or mobile push
• Integrate application events with Lambda and SQS
• Enforce ordering and exactly-once semantics with FIFO topics
• Route messages to specific subscribers using filter policies
• Set up reliable delivery with retries, DLQs, and monitoring

Best practices

• Prefer SQS subscribers for durability and to decouple consumers from failures
• Use message attributes and filter policies to reduce unnecessary deliveries and cost
• Enable server-side encryption (SSE) and topic policies to secure access
• Use FIFO topics when strict ordering or deduplication is required
• Include correlation IDs and keep messages small (under 256 KB) for traceability
• Configure dead-letter queues and sensible retry/delivery policies for HTTP endpoints

Example use cases

• Order processing: publish order events to an SNS topic that fans out to analytics, fulfillment, and notification SQS queues
• Mobile notifications: send targeted push messages via Application protocol or SMS for urgent alerts
• Microservices integration: trigger Lambda functions from topic events and use filter policies to route specific event types
• Cross-account notifications: use topic policies and VPC endpoints for secure cross-account or private network delivery
• FIFO workflow: maintain strict event ordering for payment or inventory systems using FIFO topics