You can use the Create Topic service to create a topic to which publishers can send notifications and messages. Each topic has a unique name, the Amazon resource name, that identifies the Amazon SNS endpoint for publishers to post messages and subscribers to register for notifications.

You can use the Subscribe Topic service to subscribe an endpoint to a topic. A subscribing endpoint may be a mobile app, web server, email address, or an Amazon SQS queue that can receive notification messages from Amazon SNS. Once you subscribe an endpoint to a topic and the subscription is confirmed, Amazon SNS Connector sends push messages and notifications from the topic to the subscriber endpoints. Subscribers receive all messages published to the topics to which they subscribe, and all subscribers to a topic receive the same messages.

You can use the Publish Message service to publish messages to a topic. The format of the outgoing message to each endpoint depends on the subscription protocol you select for the subscribed endpoint.

Amazon SNS uses signature version 4 signing process for secure communication. The Signature Version 4 signing process describes how to add authentication information to AWS requests. For security, most requests to AWS must be signed with the access key ID and secret access key.