Amazon SNS Update – Large Topics and MPNS Authenticated Mode

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fast and flexible push messaging service. You can easily send messages to Apple, Google, Fire OS and Windows devices, including Android devices in China (via Baidu Cloud Push).

Today we are enhancing SNS with support for large topics (more than 10,000 subscribers) and authenticated delivery to MPNS (Microsoft Push Notification Service).

Large Topics
SNS offers two publish modes. First, you can push messages directly to specific mobile devices. Second, you can create an SNS topic, provide your customers with a mechanism to allow them to subscribe to the topic, and then publish messages to the topic with a single API call. This mode is great for broadcasting breaking news, announcing flash deals, and announcing in-game events or new features. You can combine customers from different platforms in the same topic and you can send a specific payload to each platform (for example, one for iOS and another for Android), again in a single call. Suppose you have created the following topic:

With the ARN for the topic (arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:xxxxxxxxxxxx:amazon-sns) in hand, here’s how you publish a message to all of the subscribers:

$result = $client->publish(array(
    'TopicArn' => 'arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:xxxxxxxxxxxx:amazon-sns',
    // Message is required
    'Message' => 'Hello Subscribers',
    'Subject' => 'Hello'
));

Today we are lifting the limit of 10,000 subscriptions per SNS topic; you can now create as many as you need and no longer need to partition large subscription lists across multiple topics. This has been a frequent request from AWS customers that use SNS to build news and media sharing applications.

There is an administrative limit of 10 million subscriptions per topic, but we’ll happily raise it if you expect to have more subscribers for a single topic. Fill out the Contact Us form, select SNS, and we’ll take good care of you!

Authenticated Delivery to MPNS
Microsoft Push Notification Service (MPNS) is the push notification relay service for Windows Phone devices prior to Windows 8.1. SNS now supports authenticated delivery to MPNS. In this mode, MPNS does not enforce any limitations on the number of notifications that can be sent to a channel in any given day (per the documentation on Windows Phone Push Mode, there’s a daily limit of 500 unauthenticated push notifications per channel).

If you require this functionality for devices that run Windows 8.1 and above, please consider using Amazon SNS for Windows Notification Service (WNS).

— Jeff;