Amazon Web Services Launches Simple Notification Service

Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), allowing developers of hosted cloud applications to set up and send push notifications from their platform — and better yet, ISVs and VARs may well be able to leverage it for free. Here’s the scoop.

Amazon SNS lets you create topics the developer wants to notify applications or people about, add clients to those topics, and have created messages delivered over the protocol of your choice, including e-mail and HTTP. The messages are delivered using push, which means that the application doesn’t need to poll the server to find new messages.

Probably the best part is that Amazon SNS is free to customers for the first 100,000 requests, the first 100,000 HTTP notifications, and the first 1,000 e-mail notifications — I’ll bet that many developers can work entirely within those free tiers, and if you can’t, Amazon’s charging on a pay-per-message scale.

By placing this infrastructure in place on their end, Amazon is making life a lot easier for developers. Push messaging like Amazon SNS can be used for monitoring applications, workflow systems, mobile applications, or any number of other things.

We’re checking to see if Microsoft Windows Azure is going to add this feature.

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