A complete guide on Notification Infrastructure for Modern Applications in 2023

In today's digital landscape, effective communication stands as the cornerstone of customer engagement and user satisfaction. If you're reading this blog, you already grasp the paramount importance of timely notifications in elevating user interaction and propelling business expansion. Whether it's notifying users about a fresh message, an upcoming event, or a simple status update, a dependable notification service is indispensable.

The Challenge of In-House Notification Infrastructure

Yet, constructing an in-house notification infrastructure isn't a walk in the park. It necessitates meticulous planning, development prowess, and ongoing maintenance. In this blog, we'll delve into the various components that constitute a notification infrastructure. By the end of this journey, you'll possess a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to construct an in-house notification service, the challenges that lie ahead, and the strategic choices suited to your organization.

Building Blocks: Functional Components

A notification infrastructure operates seamlessly when several components synergize to deliver a superior notification experience. Let's delve into the intricacies of some key functional components:

• Delivery Channels & Vendor Integrations:

  • Notification delivery channels form the bedrock of message dissemination. Given the diverse array of channels users frequent, reaching them through multiple channels becomes imperative for optimal engagement. Consequently, the notification service must seamlessly integrate with various channels, such as email, SMS, in-app (bell icon), push notifications, WhatsApp, Slack/Teams, automated calls, and more. This integration process involves vendor evaluation, multiple API integrations, quality assessment, rigorous testing and monitoring, and contingency planning.

• Templating Engine:

  • At the heart of any notification service lies the art of crafting messages that resonate with users. Multi-channel notifications require tailoring content to suit the strengths of each channel. Templates demand significant time and engineering resources, entailing constant updates for copywriting, personalization, unified branding, dynamic variable integration, cross-channel rendering, multilingual support, error handling, conditional statement management, testing, and deployment. Providing visual editors for all channels allows non-engineers to create and experiment with notifications. SuprSend provides you with a well-built templating engine in its notification infrastructure which can also connect well with your AWS infrastructure

• User Preferences:

  • Precision in targeting is crucial to avoid notification fatigue and prioritize user-centricity. While marketing notifications often offer a simple opt-out option, this approach isn't always applicable to product notifications. Users appreciate receiving certain notifications but desire flexibility with others. Establishing a robust user preference management system ensures that users receive messages of the right type, through the preferred channel, at the appropriate frequency. It involves creating an intuitive user interface for businesses and users to define their notification experience, encompassing notification types, preferred communication channels, frequency, and timing, with opt-in/opt-out choices being essential. Try SuprSend preference management option to get either an internal or hosted preference management page.

• Multi-Tenancy for Customers:

  • If your product serves multiple tenants or customers and triggers notifications for their users, a notification architecture supporting multi-tenancy becomes paramount. Functionally, this entails data isolation, customization of notification settings, on-brand template creation, routed notifications for each tenant, and customization of notification channels and user preferences. For instance, as a SaaS platform generating invoices, maintaining brand consistency for each customer becomes crucial within a shared infrastructure.

• Notification Analytics:

  • For product managers, insights into notification effectiveness prove invaluable. Monitoring delivery rates, open rates, and user engagement enables data-driven optimizations in notifications. Depending on the channel, you may need to consume user actions from a webhook (e.g., Sendgrid provides delivery, open, click), or build your infrastructure for tracking (e.g., push notifications or AWS SES). Standardizing user actions across channels facilitates effective cross-channel notification analysis.

Pillars of Reliability: Non-Functional Components

A notification service cannot afford downtime, especially for notifications demanding user attention or compliance. The following non-functional components operate behind the scenes to ensure reliability, scalability, and efficiency:

• Scalability & Load Balancing:

  • A notification service experiences varying traffic levels, often peaking unexpectedly. Designing for scalability ensures the system can handle increased loads without performance degradation. Load balancing across servers and regions maintains consistent service availability.

• Fault Tolerance, Redundancy & Failure Retries:

  • Downtime is not an option in a notification system. Engineers must architect the service with redundancy and failover mechanisms to mitigate server failures or network issues. This involves state management, fallback vendor configurations, request throttling according to channel and vendor rate limits, and setting up retries on failure. Understanding failure reasons is integral to this process.

• High Deliverability:

  • Achieving high deliverability involves various aspects, such as introducing multiple channels, selecting reliable vendors, managing inactive channels, and effectively handling bounce management. These measures ensure that notifications reach their intended recipients.

• Low Latency:

  • Users expect notifications to arrive promptly. Minimizing latency requires optimizing message delivery paths, reducing network round trips, and optimizing database queries. Sustaining high performance as the system scales is an ongoing endeavor.

• Observability & Diagnosis:

  • Establishing comprehensive monitoring is crucial for identifying and resolving issues when failures occur. Implementing detailed logging, error tracking, and performance monitoring enables swift problem diagnosis and compliance adherence.

• Message Queue Prioritization:

  • Not all notifications hold the same priority. Prioritization is essential to prevent queue congestion with low-priority bulk notifications, which could delay the delivery of critical messages. Creating separate queues for critical, high, and low-priority notifications and defining throughput rates can save on infrastructure costs.

To Build or Not to Build: Making Informed Decisions

Now that we've explored the multifaceted components of a notification service, let's discuss when opting to build one in-house makes sense and when integration with a notification infrastructure as a service might be the better choice. Below is a succinct summary:

When to Build:

• Simplicity:

  • If your notification needs are limited in type, volume, and infrequency, and primarily involve a single channel, direct integration with vendors or a lightweight central notification service can suffice.

• Highly Customized:

  • If your business demands unique use cases that require extensive customization unavailable in third-party platforms (e.g., SMS chatbot), building a custom service in-house is the optimal solution.

• Notifications as the Core Product:

  • If your product revolves predominantly around notifications (e.g., WhatsApp), in-house ownership is preferable to reliance on third-party solutions.

When to Consider Alternatives:

• Resource Constraints:

  • Building and maintaining a notification service demands substantial engineering resources. If your team is limited, leveraging existing notification platforms or APIs may prove more efficient.

• Time to Market:

  • Developing a notification service from scratch can be time-consuming. If speed is paramount, third-party services can accelerate your product's launch.

• Complex Features:

  • If your notification requirements involve complex features like workflows, white-labeling notifications, user preferences, personalization, batching, and cross-channel communication, an established platform may offer these capabilities off the shelf.

• Focus on Core Competencies:

  • Excelling in notifications necessitates significant time and learning for experimentation, channel expertise, scaling, and building observability. This can divert attention from your core competencies.

In conclusion, a well-executed notification service has the potential to revolutionize user engagement, enhance experiences, and drive business success. Balancing functional elements that empower product teams with non-functional aspects ensuring reliability is paramount. Try Suprsend to try out all these features without ever needing to build any of these from scratch. We also offer a Startup discount program for early-staged startups.