Filter Messages Published to Topics
with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

In this tutorial, you will learn how to leverage the message filtering feature of Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). The message filter feature enables endpoints subscribed to an SNS topic to receive only the subset of topic messages it is interested in.

In our example, users visit a website to place insurance quote requests. These quote requests can be for car insurance, boat insurance, or life insurance. When an insurance quote request is placed, the request is forwarded to a series of backend systems. There’s a sales system that handles vehicle insurance for cars and boats, another sales system that handles life insurance, and an analytics system that needs to process all quote requests.

As we learned in the Send Fanout Event Notifications Tutorial, we will use a fanout messaging pattern using SNS and SQS to decouple the website from the backend systems. To get the event notifications to the right backend system, you could create a separate topic for each type of quote request, then add message routing logic to your publisher. However, this option can result in overly complicated publishers, topic proliferation, and additional overhead in provisioning and managing your SNS topics. SNS message filtering is much simpler!

You'll use Amazon SNS and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) in this tutorial.