Skip to content

SES vs. SNS

Amazon SES

Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a scalable and highly-available e-mail service designed to help marketing teams and application developers send marketing, notification, and transactional emails to their customers using a pay-as-you go model.

Can also be used to receive e-mails. Incoming e-mails can be delivered automatically to an S3 bucket.

Incoming e-mails can be used to trigger Lambda functions and SNS notifications.

SES Use Cases

  • Automated e-mails
  • Purchase confirmations, shipping notifications, order status updates
  • E.g. a mobile phone company that needs to send automated confirmation email every time a customer purchases pre-paid mobile phone minutes.
  • Marketing communications, advertisements, newsletters, and special offers
  • E.g. an online retail business that needs to let customers know about sales promotions and discounts

SNS vs. SES Exam Tips

  • Remember that SES is for e-mail only
  • It can be used for incoming and outgoing email
  • It is not subscription-based, you only need to know the e-mail address
  • SNS supports multiple formats (SMS, SQS, HTTP, email)
  • Push notifications only
  • Pub/sub model. Consumers must subscribe to a topic
  • You can fan-out messages to large number of recipients (e.g. multiple clients each with their own SQS queue).