Setting up the Amazon Simple Notication Service

The Amazon SNS is a robust way to send notification messages via multiple protocols like e-mail, SMS, HTTP, etc. There are many use cases where you can use a service like this but I want to show how to use it to get notified when my EC2 server that I created in my previous post is started. Here are the steps to create the notification:

• Create new topic

In the AWS Management Console go to the SNS service page and click ‘Create new topic’:

Name the Topic and press ‘Create Topic’:


• Create a subscription

Now subscribe to the created topic by selecting it in the overview and click ‘Create new subscription’:

As protocol choose email and fill in the mail address you want to receive the notification on:

You will see a message that a confirmation has been sent to the supplied address:

After a few seconds you will receive a mail with a link to confirm the subscription. After you click it you will see the confirmation:

When you return to the overview and refresh the view you see the topic and the subscription:

To test the subscription post a message to the topic by clicking ‘Publish to Topic’:

Enter some details for and click ‘publish’:

After a few seconds you will see the message in your inbox. Now this notification is set up the next step is to have the EC2 server sending the message when it is starting up. I will describe this in the next post.

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