Generic notification solution with plug and play architecture
Smartphone and tablet users are only too familiar with push notifications or alerts. At the heart of this feature is a notification service that provides a means to send a notice/alert to many persons/applications at once. Most notification services are based on the publish/subscribe paradigm. Some solutions offer features for sending push notifications through both apps and web browsers, others allow only on one type of push notification.
Notification services provide a wide range of options, including:
- Notifications end pints can be e-mail, SMS, another application, teams, etc.
- Messages cab ne personalized messages and targeted at specific user segments
- The notification service can be sender’s equipment or a third-party equipment
- A message may or may not require a response
For app developers, push notifications are a great way to keep users engaged with a product.
NS Notification Service
NS Notification Service (NSNS) is a fully managed messaging service for both application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication from NSPlus Technologies.
The messaging functionality uses the publish/subscribe architecture and allows a user to define the topics, specify transport protocol to be targeted and select the endpoint for notifications to be delivered. It supports the following actions:
- Add/Remove user Permission.
- Authenticate user and confirm subscription.
- Create/Delete Topics
- Get/Set Topic Attributes
- Publish/Subscribe/Unsubscribe
In an application-to-application messaging system a publisher generates topics that are nothing but logical access points that act as a communication channel. A topic allows grouping multiple endpoints for push-based, many-to-many messaging between distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven serverless applications. Using the NS notification service, you can fan-out messages to Jira, Teams, ServiceNow, and Slack for parallel processing.
The application-to-person functionality enables you to send time-critical messages to multiple users via SMS, E-mail, and WhatsApp through a “push” mechanism, eliminating the need to periodically check or “poll” for updates. The messaging system can be scaled to handle a huge number of users.
Technology used
NS Notification Service is built on the following technologies Python, PostgreSQL, Docker, and Microservices architecture.
How it works
The application stores user credentials and their client configuration on the database. When an external payload is received, it authenticates the user, stores the payload in the database and the alert generator generates an alert which triggers high thorough put topics based on pre-set flags in a publisher. Based on the configured client details (for endpoints) of the user, the publisher then pushes messages out to a large number of subscribers and logs the alerts into the database.
Benefits
- Simplifies messaging architecture and reduces costs
- Multiple messages can be sent using batching feature and messages can be sent to specific users using filtering feature
- Ordering and deduplication ensures accuracy of the messages
- Proprietary encryption and privacy protocols offer increased security
- Increase durability with message archiving, delivery retries, and dead-letter queue (DLQ)
- NSN can capture and fan out events from many web services and categories
- Sends A2P notifications via SMS, WhatsApp, and E-mail, Jira, ServiceNow and Slack.
Push notification makes messaging easy, and the goal of push notifications is to provide value to your end-users. So little thought while deciding what, when, and how frequently to push is necessary, and customizing your push notifications for specific users and identifying user segments can help delight your customers.
