Amazon SES (Simple Email Service)
This is a scalable and highly available email 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 emails: incoming mails can be delivered automatically to an S3 bucket.
Incoming mails can be used to trigger Lambda functions and SNS notifications.
Use Cases
- Automated emails
- Purchase Confirmations, shipping notifications, order status updates e.g. mobile phone company needs to send automated confirmation email every time a customer purchases pre-paid mobile phone minutes.
- marketing communications, advertisements, newsletters, special offers e.g. online retail business that needs to let customers know about sales promotions and discounts
SES -v- SNS
| SES | SNS |
|---|---|
| Email messaging service | Pub/Sub messaging service, formats include SMS, HTTP, SQS, email |
| Can trigger Lambda function or SNS notification | Can be used to trigger Lambda function |
| Can be used for both incoming and outgoing email | Can fan out messages to large number of recipients (replicate and push messages to multiple endpoints and formats) |
| An email address is all that is required to start sending messages to a user | Consumers must subscribe to a topic to receive the notifications |
Exam Tips
- Remember that SES is email only
- Can be used for incoming and outgoing mail
- No subscription based, you only need to know the email 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)