# raw sns fanout to sqs

The other day I was messing around a bit with AWS SNS and SQS, more specifically I wanted to send messages to a SNS topic and have the messages fanout to a couple of SQS queues (as mentioned in the Common SNS Scenarios documentation).

It’s simple enough to connect a SNS topic with a SQS queue:

$ aws sns subscribe --topic-arn $SNS_TOPIC_ARN \
                    --protocol sqs \
                    --notification-endpoint $SQS_QUEUE_ARN

However, the messages sent from SNS to SQS end up on a format that’s pretty far from what I wanted:

$ aws sns publish --topic-arn $SNS_TOPIC_ARN --message '{"hello": "world"}'
$ aws sqs receive-message --queue-url $SQS_QUEUE_URL
{
  "Messages": [
    {
      "Body": "{\n  \"Type\" : \"Notification\",\n  \"MessageId\" : \"42e88f9d-6436-555e-aa9e-c0a7b128eeb8\",\n  \"TopicArn\" : \"arn:aws:sns:eu-west-1:123456789000:test\",\n  \"Message\" : \"{\\\"hello\\\": \\\"world\\\"}\",\n  \"Timestamp\" : \"2016-02-14T19:17:50.008Z\",\n  \"SignatureVersion\" : \"1\"\n}"
    }
  ]
}

I abbreviated the message a bit, but it’s clear that the full SNS message has been JSON encoded and put into the Body of the SQS message.

So what I really wanted was to simply have the messages forwarded from SNS to SQS, without any surprises. Turns out it’s actually possible to achieve exactly that, though I had a hard time finding it in the documentation (not exactly sure if I even found it in the documentation). The trick is to enable the RawMessageDelivery property of the SNS subscription, for example using aws:

$ aws sns set-subscription-attributes --subscription-arn $SNS_SUBSCRIPTION_ARN \
                                      --attribute-name RawMessageDelivery \
                                      --attribute-value true

14 Feb 2016 / aws sns sqs