My Zillow estimate tracking process has been ticking along in the background, but checking email for a possible update (remembering that notices only come when a change in home valuation occurs) gets a little obsessive. Since this topic has been front of mind recently, I wanted to find a way to get a more aggressive push notification on any changes. I’ve had Brian Connelly’s nifty blog post on pushoverr in my review queue for a while, so I thought I’d give Pushovera try.

I threw together a quick Lambda function in my infrastructure collection to act as a bridge between AWS SNS and the Pushover service. This is patterned off the Scopely Slack-SNS JavaScript bridge for Heroku, though currently much less full featured. I’ve also updated the Terraform code for deploying the original Zestmate Lambda process to auto-subscribe the Pushover bridge to the SNS topic. Part of this Terraform update calls into my core infrastructure deployment process for identifying the ARN of the deployed bridge function.

The notifications to my iOS device are working well. A possible future improvement would be to rework the SNS bridge to use different output options, allowing different instances of the function to send message to Pushover, Slack, or other sources based upon environment variables – It’s such a relief finally having environment variable support in Lambda!