CASE 152 · ALMANAC · 2024
SNS deliveries that don’t silently vanish.
A notification platform fanned messages out through SNS to dozens of downstream subscribers. When a subscriber endpoint failed, SNS would retry briefly and then drop. The platform’s customers were quietly losing notifications. We added DLQs and proper delivery monitoring across every topic.
Notification platform
RELIABILITY
2024
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
SILENT DROPS
−100%
TOPICS WITH DLQ
47 / 47
AVG. RETRY EXHAUSTION
CAUGHT
CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS
−84%
HOW IT WENT
The retry-and-drop pattern was SNS’s default. The team had been operating it for years without realising that "drop" really meant gone — no log, no alert, no record. Customer support tickets about missing notifications were the only signal, and they were assumed to be customer-side issues.
We attached SQS DLQs to every SNS subscription, set delivery-retry policies appropriate to each subscriber type, and routed DLQ depth alarms through EventBridge. Failed deliveries now land somewhere queryable and triggerable, not gone.
Silent drops fell to zero — failures are caught by DLQ and either retried programmatically or paged. Customer complaints about missing notifications dropped 84% as the team could reliably reproduce and resolve the remaining edge cases.
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