What is Amazon SNS? Strange usage in my account activities

Question

What is it for? I didn't activate this services in my account. I only use EC2, S3 and SES.

But when I lookup my account activities, there are ~200 request made for SNS, which I know I didn't use. Is it for API call?

Snippet of usage report below:

Service  Operation   UsageType   StartTime   EndTime     UsageValue
AmazonSNS   ListTopics  Requests-Tier1  2/2/2012 14:00  2/2/2012 15:00  1
AmazonSNS   ListSubscriptions   Requests-Tier1  2/2/2012 14:00  2/2/2012 15:00  1
AmazonSNS   ListTopics  DataTransfer-Out-Bytes  2/2/2012 14:00  2/2/2012 15:00  0
AmazonSNS   ListSubscriptions   DataTransfer-Out-Bytes  2/2/2012 14:00  2/2/2012 15:00  0
AmazonSNS   ListSubscriptions   DataTransfer-Out-Bytes  2/2/2012 15:00  2/2/2012 16:00  0
...

Anyone have this strange problem? Thanks.

Answer 1

You can cancel SNS on your Account Management page, but I don't know if this impacts any other services.

I thought I had the same problem as you, but in my case, it was the SNS subscription/topic used by a CloudWatch usage alert that I had set up. Importantly, it was in another region, so it didn't show up obviously on my SNS Dashboard until I changed region (N. Virginia, Ireland, etc).

Check your SNS page and check all the regions for forgotten subscriptions and topics, and delete them if you don't need them. If you delete them then any Alerts that depend on them may stop working.