Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups
Register | Login

Amazon SNS VS AWS Step Functions

Compare Amazon SNS VS AWS Step Functions and see what are their differences

Cyclr
Powerful SaaS integration toolkit for SaaS developers - create, amplify, manage and publish native integrations from within your app with Cyclr's flexible Embedded iPaaS. featured
Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.
Contents:
  1. » Base Details
  2. » Videos
  3. » Reviews
  4. » Alternatives

Amazon SNS logo Amazon SNS

Fully managed pub/sub messaging for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications

AWS Step Functions logo AWS Step Functions

AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows.
  • Amazon SNS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-21
  • AWS Step Functions Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-29

Amazon SNS features and specs

  • Scalable
    Amazon SNS can handle a high-throughput of messages, making it suitable for large-scale applications.
  • Flexible
    Supports multiple message delivery formats and protocols, including HTTP/S, SQS, Lambda, SMS, and email.
  • Easy Integration
    Seamlessly integrates with various AWS services such as EC2, S3, and Lambda, simplifying the overall architecture.
  • Real-time Notifications
    Provides near-instantaneous notifications, ideal for time-sensitive applications.
  • Reliability
    Offers high availability and durability, ensuring that messages are reliably delivered.
  • Cost-effective
    Pay-as-you-go pricing model can be cost-effective for various use cases.
  • Security Features
    Supports fine-grained access control and encryption to ensure secure message delivery.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon SNS

  • Complexity
    May require a learning curve to fully understand and configure, particularly for those not familiar with AWS services.
  • Potential Latency
    Message delivery can occasionally have latency issues, particularly over less reliable network connections.
  • Limited Message Size
    SNS has a limit of 256KB per message, which may be restrictive for certain use cases.
  • Cost Overhead
    While it can be cost-effective, costs can accumulate with high volume and usage, especially if you are not optimizing your resources.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Using SNS ties you to the AWS ecosystem, which might be a disadvantage if you are looking for a multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic solution.
  • Limited Protocols for Direct Communication
    Although several protocols are supported, certain specific or legacy protocols may not be directly compatible.

AWS Step Functions features and specs

  • Orchestration
    AWS Step Functions provide a way to coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows, making it easier to build and run distributed applications and microservices.
  • Visual Workflow
    The service offers a visual interface to build, run, and monitor multi-step workflows, allowing for easier debugging and comprehension of complex processes.
  • Error Handling
    Step Functions offer built-in error handling, retry logic, and state management, which simplifies the process of managing failures and ensures more robust applications.
  • Scalability
    As a fully managed service, AWS Step Functions handle the scaling of operations automatically, allowing workflows to scale based on demand without manual intervention.
  • Integration
    Deep integration with other AWS services such as Lambda, ECS, SNS, SQS, and DynamoDB, making it straightforward to build complex, integrated workflows.
  • Cost-Effectiveness
    Pay-as-you-go pricing model means you only pay for each state transition, which can be more cost-effective compared to maintaining your own orchestration layer.
  • Audit and Logging
    Automatically logs the state of each execution, which can be used for auditing, debugging, and monitoring purposes.
  • Serverless
    Being a serverless service, it eliminates the need for server management and scaling concerns, ensuring a simpler operational setup.

Possible disadvantages of AWS Step Functions

  • Complexity
    For simple tasks, the overhead of creating and managing workflows with Step Functions can be excessive compared to using straightforward AWS Lambda functions or other simple services.
  • Cold Start Latency
    Like other serverless services, AWS Step Functions can suffer from cold start latency, especially in low-usage scenarios.
  • Cost
    While the pay-as-you-go model can be cost-effective, for workflows with a high number of state transitions, costs can accumulate quickly, making it potentially expensive.
  • Service Limits
    AWS Step Functions have certain limits, such as the number of active state machines per account and state transition limits, that could impact very large scale operations.
  • Learning Curve
    There can be a significant learning curve associated with mastering the service, particularly for those unfamiliar with AWS or similar orchestration tools.
  • JSON-Based Definitions
    State machines are defined in JSON, which can become complex and less readable when dealing with large workflows involving multiple states.
  • Limited Regional Availability
    As with many AWS services, Step Functions are not available in all regions, which can limit its use for global applications.

Amazon SNS videos

No Amazon SNS videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

AWS Step Functions videos

+ Add

Orchestrating Distributed Business Workflows with AWS Step Functions - AWS Online Tech Talks

More videos:

  • Review - AWS Step Functions: Parallelism and concurrency in Step Functions and AWS Lambda
  • Review - AWS Step Functions: Workflows for development and testing

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon SNS and AWS Step Functions)

Amazon SNS

AWS Step Functions

Push Notifications
100 100%
Push Notifications
0% 0
Workflow Automation
0 0%
Workflow Automation
100% 100
Web Push Notifications
100 100%
Web Push Notifications
0% 0
Automation
0 0%
Automation
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Amazon SNS and AWS Step Functions. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Amazon SNS and AWS Step Functions

Amazon SNS Reviews

6 Best Notification Infrastructure for Modern Applications
Lastly, let’s not forget Simple Notification Service by Amazon, a web service that supports application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication between distributed environments, microservices, and event-driven serverless applications.
Source: geekflare.com

AWS Step Functions Reviews

Top 8 Apache Airflow Alternatives in 2024
This service suits for many use cases, such as building ETL pipelines, orchestrating microservices, and managing high workloads. AWS Step Functions is particularly efficient when combined with other AWS solutions: Lambda for computing, Dynamo DB for storage, Athena for Analytics, SageMaker for machine learning, etc.
Source: blog.skyvia.com
10 Best Airflow Alternatives for 2024
AWS Step Functions enable the incorporation of AWS services such as Lambda, Fargate, SNS, SQS, SageMaker, and EMR into business processes, Data Pipelines, and applications. Users and enterprises can choose between 2 types of workflows: Standard (for long-running workloads) and Express (for high-volume event processing workloads), depending on their use case.
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

AWS Step Functions might be a bit more popular than Amazon SNS. We know about 67 links to it since March 2021 and only 55 links to Amazon SNS. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Amazon SNS mentions (55)

  • Event-Driven Architecture on AWS
    Event Routers: Services like Amazon SQS (A managed message queuing), Amazon SNS (A pub/sub messaging), AWS Step Functions (An orchestrate serverless workflows) and Amazon EventBridge (A serverless event bus) act as event routers, establishing the paths and flow for messages within the architecture. They enable seamless handling and distribution of events, ensuring that each message reaches its intended destination... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Serverless Site Health Check Notification System
    This blog details how you can use some key serverless components from AWS like Amazon Eventbridge, AWS Lambda, and Simple Notification Service to setup a system that will monitor your site (which can be running anywhere) and send emails, text messages, slack messages, and more when the reachability status of your site changes. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • WebSockets, gRPC, MQTT, and SSE - Which Real-Time Notification Method Is For You?
    Compare this to a stateless communication mechanism like Amazon SNS or other Webhook implementation where the connection is not persistent and the communication is one-way. These are intended to be used as a response to an event and inform subscribers without maintaining a continuous connection or keeping memory of previous interactions. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Programmatically reacting to S3 bucket external access exposures
    Let's make it simple and add an SNS topic target to the rule. We can add multiple different subscribers to the topic. Any time when Access Analyzer creates a new finding, SNS can, for example, send an email or a customized Slack message. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Receiving Slack notifications when CloudTrail logging gets turned off
    Of course, Slack is not the only way to receive notifications. EventBridge integrates with many target services, both AWS and 3rd parties. For example, we can set up email or phone text message alerts in SNS, or add a different target if business needs require. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
View more

AWS Step Functions mentions (67)

  • Create Stateful Serverless Workflows with AWS Step Functions and JSONata
    As an avid user of AWS Step Functions, I've been pleased by several excellent releases over the past few years, including Distributed Map, Express Workflows, Intrinsic functions, TestState, redrive, service integrations, and so many others. Those are all fantastic releases, but in my humble opinion, none of them are as big of a deal as the introduction of JSONata expressions. AWS announced this game-changing... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Automate Email Processing using Event Driven Architecture and Generative AI
    Because the code above enables EventBridge events on the bucket, we can then create a new EventBridge rule to trigger a StepFunction that will then process the emails as follows:. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • What is AWS Step Functions? - A Complete Guide
    AWS Step Functions is one of those game-changing services that has completely changed how I approach this problem. Today, I want to share my experience with Step Functions and how it can simplify your serverless workflows. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Large-scale Data Processing with Step Functions : AWS Project
    The solution uses AWS Step Functions to provides end to end orchestration for processing billions of records with your simulation or transformation logic using AWS Step Functions Distributed Map and Activity features. At the start of the workflow, Step Functions will scale the number of workers to a (configurable) predefined number. It then reads in the dataset and distributes metadata about the dataset in batches... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • How to invoke a lambda function from your database
    If you need to run long-running jobs, consider using AWS Step Functions in tandem with Lambda functions. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon SNS and AWS Step Functions, you can also consider the following products

Amazon SQS - Amazon Simple Queue Service is a fully managed message queuing service.

Apache Airflow - Airflow is a platform to programmaticaly author, schedule and monitor data pipelines.

OneSignal - Customer engagement platform used by over 1 million developers and marketers; the fastest and most reliable way to send mobile and web push notifications, in-app messages, emails, and SMS.

Kestra.io - Infinitely scalable, event-driven, language-agnostic orchestration and scheduling platform to manage millions of workflows declaratively in code.

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

Dagster - The cloud-native open source orchestrator for the whole development lifecycle, with integrated lineage and observability, a declarative programming model, and best-in-class testability.

Loading...