Best practices for creating resilient Amazon Pinpoint architectures

This chapter contains best practices for creating resilient architectures in Amazon Pinpoint.

Enable the Amazon Pinpoint event stream

When you build a resilient, multi-Region architecture, you should always enable the Amazon Pinpoint event stream. The event stream automatically delivers important information about the campaigns that you send. It also provides data about the email and SMS messages that you send, including information about whether those messages were delivered. This information is useful for tracking message delivery rates, and for troubleshooting delivery issues. For more information about enabling the Amazon Pinpoint event stream, see Streaming Amazon Pinpoint events to Kinesis in the Amazon Pinpoint Developer Guide.

As you plan your resilient Amazon Pinpoint architecture, make sure that you account for the replication of event data in your resilient Amazon Pinpoint architecture. For more information about duplicating event data, see Synchronizing event data.

Use exponential backoff

If your calls to an AWS API result in failure, we recommend that you wait an increasing amount of time before issuing the command again. For more information, see Retry behavior in the AWS General Reference.

Tailor your retry strategy to the channels that you use

Depending on the channels that you use with Amazon Pinpoint, you might need to adopt a different message retry strategy. Some channels, such as push notifications, provide results in real time. That is, either your message is accepted and sent to the push notification service, or it isn't.

The nature of other channels, such as SMS and email, is that delivery of your message might be delayed because of factors outside of the control of AWS. For example, when you send an SMS message, it might not be delivered right away because the recipient's device isn't on a mobile network, their device is turned off, or there's a temporary issue with the mobile network. In these cases, the recipient's mobile provider might attempt to redeliver the message for several hours, which increases the amount of time that passes before you receive a success or failure notification. Even if a message is delivered right away, it might still take several minutes for the mobile carrier to send an acknowledgment back to the Amazon Pinpoint event stream.

Make sure that you account for the asynchronous behavior of the email and SMS channels when designing your retry strategy. Don't expect delivery confirmations to arrive immediately. Configure your monitoring systems with this asynchronous behavior in mind.

Replicate infrastructure with code

We recommend that you replicate your infrastructure in other Regions in an automated way. By automating the replication process, you can minimize human error. AWS services, such as AWS CloudFormation, make it possible to recreate your architecture in other AWS Regions. Having a repeatable way to deploy and update AWS services helps your configurations remain consistent across Regions.

Amazon Pinpoint supports AWS CloudFormation. However, there are some Amazon Pinpoint capabilities that AWS CloudFormation doesn't currently include, including the following:

• Journeys – Amazon Pinpoint Journeys can't currently be created by using AWS CloudFormation templates. However, the Amazon Pinpoint API includes extensive support for creating journeys, updating journeys, viewing the details of a journey, and changing the state of a journey. You can use AWS Lambda functions to call the necessary Amazon Pinpoint API operations, and you can include those functions in your AWS CloudFormation templates.

• SMS origination identities – Origination identities are the identities that are used for sending SMS messages. Examples of origination identities include short codes, long codes, toll-free numbers, and 10DLC numbers. In some countries, obtaining these origination identities requires a registration process. For example, to obtain a Sender ID for sending SMS messages to recipients in India, you must register your company and use case with regulatory authorities. Along similar lines, if you want to use a short code to send SMS messages to recipients in the United States, you must register your use case with the mobile carriers.

  For more information about requesting various types of origination identities, see Requesting SMS support in the Amazon Pinpoint User Guide. For more information about the types of origination identities that are available in each country, see Supported countries and regions in the Amazon Pinpoint User Guide.