Latest: New Integrate Athenz Notification Feature With Aws Ses 2026

[!TIP] In hurry? Jump directly to Result section to see the outcome of this dive.

I’ve been diving into Athenz, an open-source RBAC/ABAC platform, running it on a local Kubernetes (Kind) cluster. Everything was working great until I needed to test the approval workflow.

I looked through official documentations and found out this "Email Notifications - Athenz", and they tell me that you can simply utilize already built AWS SES integration if you only run your Athenz server on AWS infrastructure, but I was running it locally. So, I had to figure out how to make it work on my own.

The official doc also mentioned as the following that you can build your own notification plugin, so I decided to give it a try:

This requires Athenz to be deployed on AWS. Users may use other Email Providers by following the steps to Enable Notifications using other Providers

This is the general architecture of how the Athenz Custom Plugin works:

I have successfully built and deployed a custom Athenz notification plugin that integrates with AWS SES. The plugin monitors specific Athenz events—such as role membership changes or domain modifications—and triggers email notifications via AWS SES.

The following GIF demonstrates the end-to-end workflow:

[!TIP] Soon we are coming with the local cluster + Athenz server setup guide! Meanwhile, please refer to the following guides

First, we need to set up trusted email addresses in AWS SES. AWS restricts sending emails to unverified addresses to prevent them from being flagged as spam. Therefore, we must first verify the email addresses we intend to use. For this example, we will simply use our personal email address:

Source: Dev.to