Amazon announced a new system today that will make it simple for developers to provide push notifications to users of their applications and even to other applications. The new feature, which is part of Amazon’s web services, is known as Simple Notification System or SNS for short. According to the website:
Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective capability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
To put this in English, this will allow developers to easily add a notifications feature to their applications so that you know what’s going on with them. The primary benefit to developers is that they can skip the boring task of coding a notification system from scratch. They also avoid the pitfalls of a polling system, which wastes resources and kills your battery.
Push notifications only happen when an event actually occurs. This not only frees up your mobile device or computer to do other things, but it prevents you from redirecting your attention periodically to check if anyone or anything hit you up. The fact that this has been made available in the cloud from Amazon at a pretty affordable price may be a huge benefit both to developers and consumers.
This new notifications system goes right along with the way the web is heading. Push notifications happen in basically real time. Take a location-based application as an example. Using SNS, users of the application can be notified immediately whenever a friend checks in nearby. The notifications can happen via the protocol of choice (email, HTTP, etc.) to provide the best solution within the current application.
The system requires the user to opt-in so that we can avoid any spammy situations. SNS is secure and scalable so that, as the user base grows, your notifications system doesn’t get bogged down or clogged. Nothing worse than getting a sudden burst of notifications about old information.
What is most interesting about this service is the Free Tier. For applications that don’t send out that many notifications or that are just getting on their feet, you may not need to pay a dime to use the service:
You can get started with Amazon SNS for free. Each month, Amazon SNS customers pay no charges for the first 100,000 Amazon SNS Requests, no charges for the first 100,000 Notifications over HTTP and no charges for the first 1,000 Notifications over Email. Many applications may be able to operate just within these free tier limits.