[amstrad464]

"Real messaging" aside, this is an interesting question. It'd be great to hear from iain_hecker if they considered using RabbitMQ (or similar) and if yes, why SQS/SNS were chosen.

Also, I'd be interested to read more about how you handle authentication across web/mobile. Thank you for the blog post and for taking the time to answer questions here. :-)

[futurepaul]

We have considered stuff like RabbitMQ. They would be excellent solutions too and we are working on a part of our architecture with MQTT/protobuf (more on that later, I'm sure). We went with SNS/SQS because we don't have to build a cluster with that. Building clusters is hard and Amazon takes care of that. Since we were already using a bunch of AWS products, this was a nice fit and we're quite happy with it.

Authentication is a good idea for an article too. Thanks :)