Amazon Web Services has announced a significant enhancement to its Simple Notification Service (SNS) with the introduction of high-throughput mode for FIFO topics. The update, announced on January 21, 2025, brings the performance capabilities of FIFO topics in line with SNS standard topics across all regions, while maintaining the crucial message ordering within message groups that businesses rely on.
Amazon Web Services has announced a significant enhancement to its Simple Notification Service (SNS) with the introduction of high-throughput mode for FIFO topics. The update, announced on January 21, 2025, brings the performance capabilities of FIFO topics in line with SNS standard topics across all regions, while maintaining the crucial message ordering within message groups that businesses rely on.
The enhancement dramatically increases message processing capacity, with users now able to leverage up to 30,000 messages per second per account in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. Other major regions, including US West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland), support up to 9,000 messages per second per account. This represents a substantial increase from the previous limit of 300 messages per second per message group ID and 3,000 messages per second per topic.
At the heart of this improvement is a shift in how Amazon SNS handles message deduplication. The new high-throughput mode reduces the deduplication scope to the message-group level, moving away from the previous topic-level approach. This change is activated by setting the FifoThroughputScope topic attribute to MessageGroup. Once enabled, this setting cannot be reversed back to topic-level throughput, so AWS recommends implementing it during topic creation for the best customer experience.
To support this enhanced throughput, Amazon SNS distributes FIFO topic data across multiple partitions, each automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones within an AWS Region. The service manages these partitions automatically, scaling them up or down based on the ingress rate, without requiring any customer intervention.
For organizations looking to implement this enhancement, there are important implementation considerations to note. When Amazon SQS FIFO queues are subscribed to an SNS FIFO topic with high throughput enabled, AWS recommends enabling high throughput on these queues as well to ensure smooth message delivery. Users should also be aware that temporary Publish API throttling might occur during sudden and significant traffic increases while the topic scales to accommodate the higher volume.
The service uses message group IDs as input to an internal hash function to determine which partition processes each message. This distribution system is optimized for uniform distribution across partitions, regardless of their number. For optimal performance, AWS recommends using message group IDs that can have a large number of distinct values.
With this significant upgrade to SNS FIFO topics, AWS has addressed the growing need for high-throughput message processing while maintaining the ordered delivery that businesses depend on. The enhancement demonstrates AWS’s commitment to scaling its services to meet increasing demands, providing organizations with the tools they need to handle larger message volumes without compromising on message ordering and reliability.