Amazon SNS vs SQS: Understanding the Difference Between Messaging Services

Amazon SNS vs SQS

In modern cloud applications, messaging services play a critical role in building scalable, decoupled, and event-driven architectures. On AWS, two of the most commonly used services for this purpose are Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS).

At first glance, they may appear similar since both handle message delivery between distributed components. However, the way they operate and the problems they are designed to solve are very different. While SNS follows a publish/subscribe model to send messages in real-time, SQS uses a message queue model to ensure reliable, point-to-point communication between producers and consumers.


In this blog, we’ll break see the key differences between SQS and SNS, explore common use cases, and look at how they can even be combined to create powerful, event-driven systems.

What is Amazon SNS?

Simple Notification Service is a fully managed publish/subscribe messaging service.

Characteristics
  • Fan-out to multiple subscribers (Lambda, SQS, Email, SMS, HTTP). 
  • Near real-time message delivery. 
  • Push-based. 
Use cases: Event Broadcasting, Application alerts and Monitoring

Example:
When a new file/image is uploaded to Amazon S3, Amazon SNS publishes a notification to multiple subscribers - for example, one Lambda function may process the image, another may handle logging, and an operations team may receive an alert indicating that a new file has arrived.

What is Amazon SQS?

Simple Queue Service is a fully managed message queuing service. 

Characteristics
  • First in first out or Standard queues. 
  • Pull-based: consumers poll the queue. 
  • Reliable message buffering. 
Use cases: Decoupling Microservices, Workflow Orchestration

Example:
Let say in the ETL pipeline data extraction job is complete and transformation can begin. The Transform component continuously polls the SQS queue for new message before triggering data transformation jobstep.

Conclusion

Amazon SNS and SQS serve distinct yet complementary purposes in AWS’s messaging ecosystem. SNS to broadcast messages and SQS to ensure those messages are reliably delivered and processed. By understanding when and how to use each service, we can build scalable, resilient, and decoupled systems that fully leverage AWS’s cloud-native capabilities.

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