SES vs SNS
Amazon SES
Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a scalable and highly available email service designed to help marketing teams and application developers send marketing, notificatoin, and transactional emails to their customers using a pay as you go model.
Can also be used to receive emails: incoming mails can be delivered automatically to an S3 bucket.
Incoming emails can be used to trigger Lambda Functions and SNS notifications.
Think of marketing emails
Amazon SES Use Cases
- Automated emails
- Purchase Confirmations, shipping notifications, order status updates
- e.g. a mobile phone company that needs to send automated confirmation email every time a customer purchases pre-paid mobile phone minutes
- Marketing communications, advertisements, newsletters, special offers
- e.g. an online retail business that needs to let customers know about sales promotions and discounts
SES Vs SNS
| SES | SNS |
|---|---|
| Email Messaging Service | Pub/sub messaging service, formats include SMS, HTTP, SQS, email |
| Can trigger Lambda functino or SNS notification | Can be used to trigger Lambda Function |
| Can be used for both incoming and outgoing email | Can fan out messages to large number of recipients (replicate and push messages to multiple endpoints and formats) |
| An email address is all that is required to start sending messages to a user | Consumers must subscribe to a topic to receive the notifications |
SNS Vs SES Exam Tips
- Remember that SES is for email only
- It can be used for incoming and outgoing mail
- It is not subscription based, you only need to know the email address
-
- SNS supports multiple formats (SMS, SQS, HTTP, email)
- Push notifications only
- Pub-sub model: consumers must subscribe to a topic
- You can fan-out messages to large number of recipients
- e.g. multiple clients each with their own SQS queue