AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Test

Which AWS service is ideal for notifying downstream systems of CloudFormation events?

1. Simple Email Service (SES)

2. Simple Notification Service (SNS)

3. Amazon SQS

4. AWS Lambda

The correct answer is: Simple Notification Service (SNS)

The Simple Notification Service (SNS) is particularly well-suited for notifying downstream systems of CloudFormation events due to its ability to send notifications to multiple subscribers and support various protocols. When you integrate SNS with CloudFormation, you can receive notifications about stack events such as creation, updates, and deletions, which can be extremely valuable for monitoring and automation purposes. SNS allows you to fan out messages to multiple endpoints—such as email, SMS, or even other AWS services like Lambda and SQS—making it a versatile choice for event-driven architectures. By using SNS, downstream systems can remain decoupled from the CloudFormation stacks, enhancing maintainability and scalability. As a result, when a CloudFormation event occurs, an SNS topic can publish the event information to all subscribed systems, thus ensuring that all relevant systems are notified reliably and promptly. While other options like SES provide email sending capabilities or SQS allows for queue-based messaging, they do not offer the same level of event-driven notification integration that SNS provides in the context of CloudFormation events. Lambda could be used for processing events but would still require a notification mechanism like SNS to inform it of changes, making SNS the ideal choice for this specific use case.