The Simple Notification Service, or SNS for short, is one of the central services to build serverless architectures in the AWS cloud. SNS itself is a serverless messaging service that can distribute massive numbers of messages to different recipients. These include mobile end-user devices, like smartphones and tablets, but also other services inside the AWS ecosystem. SNS’ ability to target AWS services makes it the perfect companion for AWS Lambda.

In this article, we’ll deep dive into all the basics to help you decide if AWS RDS is the right decision for your architecture and help you hit the ground running if you do end up AWS RDS. For many decades now, relational databases (RDS) have been the place to store your data. They are pretty flexible often use some kind of SQL dialect, which is one of the main languages taught in computer science classes, and widely understood by the average developer.