Publish and Subscribe with Amazon SNS and SQS

Modern distributed applications rarely operate as a single monolithic process; they are composed of independent components that need to communicate reliably. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) are two foundational AWS messaging services that solve this communication challenge. SNS implements the publish-subscribe pattern, where a single message published to a topic is automatically delivered to all subscribers, while SQS provides durable message queues that decouple producers from consumers and guarantee message delivery even when downstream systems are temporarily unavailable.

When combined, SNS and SQS enable the fan-out pattern, one of the most powerful messaging architectures in cloud computing. A single SNS notification can simultaneously deliver messages to multiple SQS queues, email addresses, and other endpoints, allowing parallel processing without the publisher needing to know anything about its consumers.

In this lab, you will create an SNS topic, add an email subscription, create an SQS queue, subscribe the queue to the topic, publish messages, and poll the queue to observe the fan-out pattern in action.

Objectives

By completing this beginner lab, you will be able to:

• Create an Amazon SNS topic and configure an email subscription
• Create an Amazon SQS standard queue with appropriate settings
• Subscribe an SQS queue to an SNS topic to enable fan-out messaging
• Publish messages to an SNS topic and verify delivery to multiple subscribers
• Poll and retrieve messages from an SQS queue

Who is this lab for?

This lab is designed for:

• Cloud beginners who want to understand messaging and event-driven patterns on AWS
• Developers and architects looking to learn the fundamentals of SNS and SQS before building decoupled systems

Basic familiarity with the AWS Management Console is recommended.