When using SNS pub/sub components, a common integration pattern is to use Lambda to process SNS messages. This can include the use of data blobs as the SNS payload for doing file processing, data transformations, and archiving data in S3 among other things. SNS messages have a large payload limit of 256KB per message, but I recently ran into a situation where I could not reliably deliver messages that were sized well under that limit.

As it turns out, when Lambda is consuming your SNS large payloads in events, you hit a limit within Lambda that is exactly half of the SNS payload limit. For Event (asynchronous) invocations in Lambda, there is a 128KB payload limit. So, if your SNS messages are not being processed by Lambda, check the size of the messages and verify that they are below 128KB. This was a confusing problem until I looked at the CloudWatch console for SNS message deliveries and noticed the errors there.