14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon continues its push into cloud computing with an interesting new service that complements nicely the other cloud services the company is already offering. The Amazon Simple Notification Service allows developers to add a notification system to their apps. The notifications themselves can take several forms and can be aimed at subscribers or other applications. Developers can also choose the protocol they want or need, be it HTTP or email.
"Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud," Amazon announced.
"Amazon SNS provides a simple web services interface that can be used to create topics you want to notify applications (or people) about, subscribe clients to these topics, publish messages, and have these messages delivered over clients’ protocol of choice (i.e. HTTP, email, etc.). Amazon SNS delivers notifications to clients using a ‘push’ mechanism that eliminates the need to periodically check or ‘poll’ for new information and updates," the announcement explained.
There is definitely a trend towards 'push' systems in most of today's web services and apps. Twitter's meteoric rise proved the need for real-time information. Various other technologies have been developed as a means to get information to the users rather than wait for the users to ask for it. The aging RSS/Atom protocols are getting a new shot of life thanks to push technologies like PubSubHubBub.
Of course, it's not only real-time services that would benefit from a notification system. Such a system could be implemented to monitor and control a complex computing system. Amazon says this could be set up to control several EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances, for example. For a developer already using one of Amazon's Web Services, SNS could prove a very easy way of deploying a very scalable notification system.
Amazon has also set up an interesting pricing scheme. The first 100,000 SNS requests, the first 100,000 HTTP notifications and the first 1,000 email notifications are all free. Most developers could operate within these limits and don't pay anything. Those that need more, though, will pay $0,06 for 100,000 SNS API requests or 100,000 SNS notifications and $2 for 100,000 emails. Data traffic will also be billed separately.