Amazon Pinpoint API vs AWS Simple Notification Services - amazon-web-services

For the purpose of sending push notifications from the backend, if we need a Push Notification Platform, could you please suggest which of these is intended for that purpose – Amazon SNS or Pinpoint?

Both Amazon SNS and Amazon Pinpoint, supports sending push notification to various devices (e.g Android, iOS etc)
The major difference between Amazon SNS & Amazon Pinpoint is that :
with Amazon SNS you have to set up your application to manage each message's audience, content, and delivery schedule. On the other hand, with Amazon Pinpoint you do not have to code these features, most of them are already built in. With Amazon Pinpoint, you can collect data about your app usage, create highly-targeted segments and send full campaigns(either immediate or scheduled) plus many more features.

Related

How to get forecasted AWS alerts/outages in email?

2 weeks back, I saw a notification in AWS saying, the one of the 3 AWS EC2 instance will be stopped because of the underlying hardware cause. I almost missed the dead line as I didn't the notification via email. Is there a way get these notification via email?
It would be much better if I can get the notifications using cloud watch to my email.
If you're on Business or Enterprise Support, AWS provides a solution named "AWS Health Aware" built on top of AWS Health API, it does exactly what you're after sends you notifications via several methods including emails regarding outages and planning maintenance that affect your account(s).
If you're on a Basic support plan you can easily built something similar yourself using based on [AWS Health events][2]
This is an example of capturing AWS Health events via EventBridge so they can be further send to a lambda or SNS
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/health/latest/ug/cloudwatch-events-health.html
What I've done in the is following:
Capturing AWS Health events via EventBridge in spoke accounts and forward them to the event bus in my hub account
In the hub account I would subscribe a lambda function for all events with source "aws.health" and then send email or slack message whatever works for you.
I think Amazon EventBridge is what you are looking for. With EventBridge you can detect and react to different events such as EC2 instances scheduled for updates. You can, for example, create a rule for detecting a specific health event and in the target section choose to receive an email through SNS or invoke a CloudWatch log group, etc. Read more here.

Amazon Pinpoint vs. Amazon SES/SMS

I would like to send a verification code to a specific user (only one) via email or text message. I have successfully done so through Amazon SES but I have not attempted through Amazon SMS yet. I have found myself going down the rabbit hole of investigating AWS Pinpoint.
It seems to me Pinpoint is meant for mass user messaging (text/email) rather than one-of individual messaging. I'm hoping I gathered that correctly.
My question, is there an advantage/disadvantage of using Pinpoint over Amazon SES and SMS for my use case?
This may be addressed by the Pinpoint FAQ
Q: I already use Amazon SNS or Amazon SES. What do I gain by switching
to Amazon Pinpoint?
In typical Amazon SNS and Amazon SES use cases, you have to set up
your application to manage each message's audience, content, and
delivery schedule. These same features are built in to Amazon
Pinpoint. With Amazon Pinpoint, you can create message templates,
delivery schedules, highly-targeted segments, and full campaigns.
Pinpoint also appears to be able to push notifications to users through the users preferred contact mechanism. This means that you are not limited to SMS and you reach your users with activation codes through the means they want to be reached. It also allows two-way communication.
The Pinpoint homepage also says:
You can send direct messages—such as order confirmations, welcome
messages, and one-time passwords—using the console or the Amazon
Pinpoint REST API. You can also use the API to build custom
applications that deliver campaign and transactional messages across
multiple channels.
This suggest it is suitable for your uses, though it has additional mass-communication features you do not currently need.
In addition to above points mentioned by #Freiheit you can send and receive SMS messages through Amazon Pinpoint. This will help you to track user response and create surveys, reviews and quiz like scenarios.
Check this AWS Documentation link

Amazon MWS Push Notifications

I want to develop an app that allows the users of the app (sellers on Amazon), to send me a notification when they receive an order on Amazon (a notification containing informations about the order).
Is it possible?
Maybe only the seller can receive notifications about his account.
I think, if it's possible, I need a MWS and a AWS account.
In the documentation of MWS (https://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/notifications/Notifications_Overview.html), there is:
The Amazon MWS push notifications enable you to receive information
that is relevant to your business with Amazon without having to poll
the Amazon MWS service. Instead, the information is sent directly to
you when an event occurs to which you are subscribed. For more
information about how to subscribe to receive notifications, see
Subscriptions Overview in the Amazon MWS Subscriptions API section
reference.
Then, in the 'Subscriptions API' section:
The Amazon MWS Subscriptions API section enables you to subscribe to
receive notifications that are relevant to your business with Amazon.
With the operations in the Subscriptions API section, you can register
to receive important information from Amazon without having to poll
the Amazon MWS service. Instead, the information is sent directly to
you when an event occurs to which you are subscribed.
To receive notifications, you must first create and register a
Destination, such as an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
queue. Then, you create a Subscription for the NotificationType that
you want to receive, such as a notification when another Seller has
changed their offer for an item that you also sell. Finally, verify
that Amazon is able to send notifications to your Destination by
calling the SendTestNotificationToDestination operation.
Not at this time. The only notification options are AnyOfferChangedNotification, which sends an SQS message when any one of the top 20 offers for an ASIN changes, and FulfillmentOrderStatusNotification, which notifies you if there is a multi channel order status chance, and FeePromotionNotification.
This hasn't changed since I started using the AnyOfferChangedNotification several years ago.
One idea is to create an app that uses the Orders API periodically to check for orders, then you can have the app create the SQS message (or use another service altogether). This would then notify you of a new order.

Looking for PubSub messaging for end-clients on AWS

Does AWS offer a service for real-time publish&subscribe messaging for end clients? (web, mobile, desktop).
I'm looking for something that is topic based, optionally with a statfull model of data, where clients can subscribe to topics, receive data published on these topics at real time, etc.
(similar to what Google Firebase offers).
Thanks.
Yes. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) provides:
Topic creation
Publishing of messages to the topic
Subscription to a topic via:
Email
HTTP/S endpoint (effectively, a REST call)
SMS
Sending to an Amazon SQS queue
Triggering an AWS Lambda function
Sending mobile notifications (iOS, Android, Baidu, Windows mobile, Windows desktop, Mac desktop)

SNS Batch Publish

I see AWS publish API for sending push notifications to devices.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/api/API_Publish.html
According to:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/push-notifications-to-mobile-devices-using-amazon-sns/
We can
"Send messages directly to a specific device by calling the Publish function with the device’s ARN. You can easily scale this to handle millions of users by storing the endpoint ARNs in Amazon DynamoDB and using multi-threaded code on the server."
If I want to send push notifs to 100K users (who haven't registered to a specific topic), is there a multi-publish (or batch-publish) API, where I don't need to call the "Push notifications" API for every single user?
probably not. the devices need to be registered (i.e. for SNS you actually have to create the endpoint for each device).
After you have the endpoint you can subscribe them to either one or multiple SNS endpoint and start publishing notifications through them.