SNS
Last updated: Nov 3, 2026
Rationale
Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) is the service that Fluid Attacks uses for publish and subscribe notifications in the cloud. A publisher sends a message to a topic one time, and all the subscribers of the topic receive it.
Fluid Attacks chose Amazon SNS over other alternatives for these reasons:
- It is a fully managed serverless service. Fluid Attacks does not provision resources, and it pays for each message.
- It complies with many certifications from ISO and CSA. Many of these certifications make sure that the entity uses best practices for secure cloud-based environments and information security.
- Other AWS services use it as their notification target, for example, CloudWatch alarms and AWS Budgets. Thus, an alert can get to people without code.
- It supports email subscriptions. Email is the delivery channel that the engineers of Fluid Attacks already monitor.
- Lambda can publish to it with the AWS SDK. Thus, a scheduled function can change raw findings into a digest that is easy to read.
- It supports server-side encryption with KMS and topic policies that control which services can publish.
- Fluid Attacks can write its resources as code with Terraform.
Alternatives
Fluid Attacks does not examine alternatives at this time. SNS is the built-in destination of the AWS services that send the alerts of Fluid Attacks, and its notifications are only for the engineering team.
Usage
Fluid Attacks uses Amazon SNS for these tasks:
- Send an email to the engineering team when AWS Budgets forecasts or goes above the monthly account budget or the Bedrock budget.
- Send a daily digest of Amazon Inspector findings. A scheduled Lambda function makes this digest.
- Send a digest of least-privilege recommendations from IAM Access Analyzer. A scheduled Lambda function makes this digest.
- Send by email the CloudWatch alarms of the GitLab bot of Fluid Attacks. These alarms start when the SQS dead-letter queue of the bot receives a message, or when the bot stops the processing of its queue.
Fluid Attacks does not use Amazon SNS for these tasks:
- Email to platform users. Fluid Attacks uses SendGrid for this task.
- Event routing between AWS services. Fluid Attacks uses EventBridge for this task.