Posted On: Dec 28, 2011

We are excited to announce two new Amazon SNS features today- configurable delivery policies and protocol-specific message formatting. Configurable delivery policies provide control over http retry behavior and improve end-to-end notification reliability. New message formatting support allows message content to be optimized to fit the requirements of different delivery protocols such as email, sms, and http.

Amazon SNS delivery policies make machine-to-machine notifications more reliable by supporting configurable retry behavior to overcome server or network availability issues. Delivery policies can be applied at either the topic or subscription level to control delivery behavior to any or all http subscriptions. Different retry patterns can be specified which include linear, geometric and exponential back-off. In addition, maximum and minimum retry delays and maximum delivery rate can be bounded with user-specified values to ensure that downstream servers are never overwhelmed by delivery attempts.

With new message formatting support, Amazon SNS notification content can be optimized to provide richness that is suitable for each delivery protocol used. For example, a notification that goes to both email and SMS subscribers can be tailored to each type of client. SMS users can receive a version of the message formatted for the available 140 characters supported by the SMS standard, while email users can receive a longer, more detailed version of the same content.

Both of these new Amazon SNS features can be accessed from the AWS Management Console.