I'm unhappy with AWS SNS for orchestration and delivery tracking

That’s a common pain point. SNS is great for fan-out and simple push delivery, but it’s usually not ideal as an orchestration layer and it offers limited delivery tracking/observability unless you build extra plumbing around it.

Where SNS tends to fall short

• No real orchestration: SNS is publish/subscribe, not a workflow engine.
• Weak delivery visibility: you can tell a message was published, but end-to-end “what happened next?” is harder.
• Retry/branching logic is limited: complex conditional flows get messy fast.
• Harder to trace across systems: unless you add correlation IDs, logging, and tracing everywhere.

Common alternatives, depending on what you need

If you want orchestration

• AWS Step Functions
  • Best if you need explicit workflows, retries, branching, and state tracking.
  • Strong auditability and execution history.
• Temporal
  • Great for durable, code-first orchestration with strong retry/state semantics.
  • Good for complex business workflows.

If you want reliable async delivery

• SQS
  • Better when you need queue semantics, backpressure, and worker-based processing.
  • Pair with DLQs and visibility timeouts.
• Kafka / MSK
  • Better for event streaming, replayability, and richer event-driven architectures.
  • More operational overhead than SNS/SQS.

If you want delivery tracking / observability

• Use a combination of:
  • Correlation IDs
  • Centralized logs
  • Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry / X-Ray
  • Audit/event store
  • DLQs + metrics + alarms
• If you need “message status” as a first-class feature, you often need to design that explicitly.

Practical recommendation

A common pattern is:

• Step Functions or Temporal for orchestration
• SQS for delivery to workers
• SNS only for simple notifications/fan-out, not core workflow control

Quick rule of thumb

• SNS: “Tell multiple things something happened”
• SQS: “Make sure work gets done”
• Step Functions/Temporal: “Coordinate a process”

If you want, I can help you choose a replacement based on:

1. your workflow complexity,
2. whether you need guaranteed processing, and
3. what “delivery tracking” means in your case.