Amazon revamps push notification service as cloud providers target mobile developers

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

In the fiercely competitive world of IaaS cloud computing driven by a race to the bottom on prices, service providers are constantly looking for new services that can be outsourced from the enterprise to their cloud data centers. Hoping to ride the wave of mobile computing, cloud service providers’ latest target is mobile application development.

This week Amazon Web Services made it easier for mobile developers to send push notifications at massive scale to all types of end points, including iOS, Android and Kindle mobile devices. AWS enabled the push notification functionality through its Simple Notification Service (SNS), which also supports e-mail, Simple Queue Service (SQS), which is a messaging platform, and HTTP. Amazon’s not the first to be targeting mobile developers, though, as Rackspace and Microsoft have each equipped their clouds with services targeted specifically at mobile developers…

Amazon’s push notification service appears to be one of the most advanced among the three major cloud service providers. Managing mobile push notifications is a massive pain for developers, explains Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels in his personal blog, AllThingsDistributed, announcing the SNS updates. Amazon, Apple and Google each maintain their own relay services for sending push notifications within their individual platforms. To push across other platforms is a cumbersome and costly process for these providers, and therefore customers…

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