configure sns delivery retry backoff and enable cloudwatch delivery status logging for a topic
domain: docs.aws.amazon.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
For HTTP/S subscriptions, define a custom delivery policy with immediate, pre-backoff, backoff, and post-backoff retry phases, keeping total retry time within the hard cap of 3,600 seconds.
For non-HTTP/S endpoints such as SQS, Lambda, or SMS, rely on SNS's built-in, non-configurable delivery policies rather than trying to set a custom one.
Enable delivery status logging on the topic for each protocol you want visibility into, specifying success and failure sampling rates.
Point the delivery status logs at CloudWatch Logs and use them to see the endpoint's response and measure message dwell time for slow subscribers.
Combine with a subscription-level dead-letter queue so messages that exhaust all retries aren't silently dropped.
Known gotchas
Only HTTP/S subscriptions accept a custom delivery policy; attempting to set backoff parameters for SQS, Lambda, or SMS subscriptions has no effect since SNS enforces its own fixed policy for those protocols.
SNS applies jitter to retries by design, so exact retry timing varies run to run; don't rely on wall-clock-precise retry intervals when designing downstream rate limits.
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