What is Amazon Kinesis used for?

Amazon Kinesis is a family of AWS services for collecting, processing and analyzing real-time streaming data, including log, event, IoT and video streams. It is a good fit for collecting application logs in real time, processing IoT device telemetry and feeding event streams into analytics systems.

How much does Amazon Kinesis cost?

Amazon Kinesis is a paid product with no free plan. Usage-based. On-demand Standard costs $0.08 per GB ingested and $0.040 per GB retrieved in US-East; On-demand Advantage costs $0.032 per GB ingested and $0.016 per GB retrieved.

Is Amazon Kinesis open source?

No. Amazon Kinesis is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon Kinesis include Kafka and RisingWave.

What are some alternatives to Amazon Kinesis?

Amazon Kinesis competes with Confluent, Google Cloud Dataflow and Aiven. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon Kinesis alternatives.

Amazon Kinesis: features, pricing and alternatives

About Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis is a group of managed AWS services for working with streaming data. Applications and devices can send records to Kinesis as they happen, and other services consume and analyze them within moments instead of waiting for a batch job.

AWS describes the family as covering the collection of streaming data, the creation of real-time data pipelines, and analysis of video and data streams for log analytics, event analytics and IoT analytics. The individual services include options for ingesting data streams, delivering streams to storage and analytics destinations, processing streams with Apache Flink, and handling video streams.

Kinesis is proprietary and runs only on AWS, so it has no self-hosted edition. Charges follow AWS usage-based pricing for each service, and the vendor publishes pricing details on its website.

Key features

Real-time ingestion of streaming data
Managed data stream storage
Delivery of streams to storage and analytics
Stream processing with Apache Flink
Video stream handling
Integration with other AWS services

Good fit for

→Collecting application logs in real time
→Processing IoT device telemetry
→Feeding event streams into analytics systems

Tags: aws; streaming; real-time; event-streaming; iot; data-pipelines; log-analytics; cloud-service

Amazon Kinesis: questions and answers

What is Amazon Kinesis used for?: Amazon Kinesis is a family of AWS services for collecting, processing and analyzing real-time streaming data, including log, event, IoT and video streams. It is a good fit for collecting application logs in real time, processing IoT device telemetry and feeding event streams into analytics systems.
How much does Amazon Kinesis cost?: Amazon Kinesis is a paid product with no free plan. Usage-based. On-demand Standard costs $0.08 per GB ingested and $0.040 per GB retrieved in US-East; On-demand Advantage costs $0.032 per GB ingested and $0.016 per GB retrieved.
Is Amazon Kinesis open source?: No. Amazon Kinesis is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon Kinesis include Kafka and RisingWave.
What are some alternatives to Amazon Kinesis?: Amazon Kinesis competes with Confluent, Google Cloud Dataflow and Aiven. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon Kinesis alternatives.