Amazon Kinesis Reviews

We had real-time streaming of data and a very large volume of user activity. We applied machine learning to the data streams. So, Kinesis basically made sure that we got the data, and we didn't lose the data.

I'm not using it at my current organization. I used it at the last company. Kinesis replaced a whole tier of servers. So, we didn't need to have a server to catch the data and then send the data somewhere else. Kinesis was the input port for very large amounts of data.

What turns out to be most valuable is its integration with Lambda functions because you can process the data as it comes in. As soon as data comes, you'll fire a Lambda function to process a trench of data.

One thing that would be nice would be a policy for increasing the number of Kinesis streams because that's the one thing that's constant. You can change it in real time, but somebody has to change it, or you have to set some kind of meter. So, auto-scaling of adding and removing streams would be nice.

I'd like to see the size of a Kinesis message go to at least one megabyte per message. That would be nice, but that's an extreme case.

I have been using it since it came out in 2014.

It is stable.

It is scalable. In the previous company, it was customer-facing. So, there were hundreds of thousands of users. There were very large data volumes.

In this company, we'll probably use Kinesis. We haven't used it yet. We have some more projects that'll come along, and then we'll need it.

I was there when it was beta. They were pretty good then, and they're still pretty good. So, they were five out of five. They were right on top of it.

We didn't use any other solution for streaming data. 

It was pretty straightforward. I had one person who did all DevOps. It did not need a dedicated person.

We had seen an ROI. We wouldn't have been able to build the product without it.

It was actually a fairly high volume we were spending. We were spending about 150 a month.

There were some that we considered, but it was a little cruder.

To someone who would like to implement it, I would simply tell not to shove giant bricks in. Data has to be reasonably sized. A single Kinesis message is measured in K, not megabytes. It's not meant for gigantic things. There is a different strategy for streaming data.

I'd rate it at least a nine out of ten. It was very close to perfect.

Amazon Kinesis is a queuing or buffering system that we use as a central place to buffer the incoming data we receive from the source. The actual destination is open-faced. Amazon Kinesis is used as a buffer in between to decouple the workload.

Amazon Kinesis's main purpose is to provide near real-time data streaming at a consistent 2Mbps rate, which is really impressive.

The solution currently provides an option to retrieve data in the stream or the queue, but it's not that helpful. We have to write some custom scripts to fetch data from there. An option to search for data in the queue can really help us in our day-to-day operations.

Since the solution is a buffer system, you write to it and read from it. The readers are called consumers. If you want to run multiple consumers reading from the queue, you have to enable the enhanced fan-out feature on Amazon Kinesis. This enhanced fan-out feature is quite costly.

There was a point when we had a huge budget increase in one week just because of the enhanced fan-out feature. This feature does not provide any special out-of-the-box functionality. Hence, we struggle to optimize multiple consumers reading from a single queue. We were charged high costs for the solution’s enhanced fan-out feature.

I have been using Amazon Kinesis for more than two years.

The solution is pretty good in terms of scaling. Amazon Kinesis has shards, which are the instances or units that the solution spins up for you. Depending upon your account quota, you can spin up as many shards as you want. You can even raise a request to increase that quota, which will be done sooner. Overall, Amazon Kinesis is a really scalable solution.

Our team, consisting of four to five people, uses the solution extensively in our organization.

We really struggle to get better support for Amazon Kinesis.

Amazon Kinesis is an expensive solution.

Amazon Kinesis is an AWS-managed service, just like S3 or EC. We don't have to deploy it; it is just there, and we spin it up. You must go to AWS' service page and click on Kinesis. Then, you can create it by clicking on Create and entering the name.

I would not recommend Amazon Kinesis to other users. Users can choose a cheaper alternative. They can use any other queuing system or in-house Kafka if they have a Kafka team. Amazon Kinesis provides near real-time read-and-write, but its cost is too high. Users can choose another option that provides the same functionality at less cost.

With Amazon Kinesis, you have to run a consumer who sees from Amazon Kinesis. AWS provides the Kinesis Client Library (KCL), which reads from the Kinesis stream. That library is also used in DynamoDB for data checkpointing. For example, if you have one day of data in Amazon Kinesis and started reading from 12 AM yesterday. The Kinesis Client Library (KCL) will check on the data in the DynamoDB. You get charged for the DynamoDB table out-of-the-box, along with Amazon Kinesis.

The DynamoDB table also costs a lot, which should not be the case. It is just read-and-write and is downloaded from the Kinesis Client Library (KCL). The DynamoDB table's cost should be very minimal, but that's not the case. The consumer is not optimal for efficient read-and-write, which further increases the cost. Both Amazon Kinesis and DynamoDB come into the picture.

Overall, I rate the solution a five or six out of ten.

We have utilized the solution for ingesting the data from different applications. For example, when people use a web server they send their weblogs, and clickstreams and the service provider wants to know how many users are currently using the site and what their areas of interest are, we use Amazon Kinesis which has the capability to enable the analytics and provide the information to them.

We also use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose for putting the IoT data on the Kinesis Data Streams because the data has to be brought from on-prem to the cloud in order to perform the analysis.

The solution has improved our organization by saving time. Before launching the solution, the only thing we have to do is know the volume of the data and what is the frequency of the data we are going to receive. Based on that, we can configure the capacity of the Kinesis Data Streams, so it divides our requirements in terms of the shards or partitions. Unlike Kafka which works in partitions, Amazon Kinesis works in shards. This means the solution can handle thousands of requests per second for writing and reading. The writing capacity is one KB per request and the reading capacity is four KB per request.

The solution has the capacity to store the data anywhere from one day to a week and provides limitless storage for us. The data is time-stamped, and the data is in sequence, so we don't need to maintain the sequence or order of the data, and multiple consumers can reference the data in the Kinesis Data Streams simultaneously. Using the same data one application can perform Task A, and another application can perform Task B. 

The Kinesis Data Stream is integrated with Amazon CloudWatch where we can monitor all the requests of who wants to read information, what kind of APIs are being requested, what errors there are, who is producing them, and who are the data consumers. All the information is logged in one spot and this allows us to identify the problematic points easily.

The solution allows us to apply the security so the consumers can have access, based on the subscription they have.

Amazon Kinesis has a fan-out feature that allows us to increase the throughput when the number of consumers increases, instead of having to pull the data from the consumer side the information is posted by the solution itself.

The services which are described in the documentation could use some visual presentation because for someone who is new to the solution the documentation is not easy to follow or beginner friendly and can leave a person feeling helpless.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The stability is good as long as no configuration mistakes are made and the data source works properly.

The scalability is good but if for example, we only created one stream, then wanted to scale it further, we would have to continuously monitor using CloudWatch to ensure the shards are not getting overloaded, otherwise, we have to split the shards. We would have to merge the shards if it is under load. The implementation is only required once with some monitoring and after that, it is very easy to scale. The scalability has some limitations but there is also an on-demand option with a script so when we need to scale up the capacity we can and if we need to decrease the capacity, we can. We can also stop the service completely by scheduling it based on event triggers.

The technical support was not able to resolve the one issue we had.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward and I give it an eight out of ten. The deployment takes around five minutes. 

We have to create our service using CLI Streams, or we can create using the console because we have to provide the configuration, including, what throughput we want, and how many reads and writes we want to be supported. Once we launch, we'll be charged monthly. Setup is very easy, we have to specify whether we want encryption of the data or not if it is accessible to everyone or not, and what kind of services are going to interact with the solution. In AWS, we have to specify, and then we have to provide the roles and policies based on the consumers.

The implementation is completed in-house.

The solution is worth the money because it is easier to set up, and since it is integrated with all the AWS services, we can manage the security, the monitoring requirements, and manage the audit information, much easier. 

The solution is costly. There is a fee to activate the service and even if it is not being used there is a monthly fee because they continue to maintain the service. If we want to retain the data for longer durations then we are charged the equivalent of Amazon S2 or S3 services. The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running. 

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

No maintenance is required for the solution because it is cloud-based.

The solution is available in all three zones, Amazon Kinesis is a good solution if a person wants scalability, availability, and durability of data. I recommend the solution to anyone already using AWS Amazon-managed Kafka service.

The solution provides real-time event streaming. 

From my experience, one of the most valuable features is the ability to track silent events on endpoints. Previously, these events might have gone unnoticed, but now we can access them within the product range. For example, if a customer reports that their calls are not reaching the portal files, we can use this feature to troubleshoot and optimize the system.

I suggest integrating additional features, such as incorporating Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon Connect as bundled offerings, rather than deploying them as separate services.

I have been using the product for a year. 

My company has four to five customers. The scalability of Amazon Kinesis has improved various data processing capabilities.

I am happy with the tool's customer support. 

Amazon Kinesis' deployment is easy. 

The tool's pricing is cheap. 

If you're considering using Amazon Kinesis for the first time, I would advise exploring their services. It can be useful for capturing real-time events, greatly benefiting your solution. I rate it a seven out of ten. 

To recover data and send it to the cloud. A few of our clients have Amazon Web Services and we use Kinesis to deploy the data to their mobiles and to their data processing system. Also to do data analytics.

The management and analytics are valuable features.

A snapshot from the stream of the data analytics I already have on the cloud. do a snapshot to stop the process and restart a few weeks later when I have more data or more availability of the client teams.

I have been using Amazon Kinesis for two years. 

The stability is a ten out of ten. 

We use cloud automation for deployment. We deploy the tags in minutes, and we can also use confirmation to test each part and test end-to-end use cases before we deploy them to the client. So we do everything with cloud automation, and it takes a few minutes to deploy a production environment.

The solution is cheap. 

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We collect data from AWS IoT Core and then capture the stream in Amazon Kinesis. The data is then stored in S3 and shifted to Snowflake for analysis.

What I like about Amazon Kinesis is that it's very effective for small businesses. It's a well-managed solution with excellent reporting. Amazon Kinesis is also easy to use, and even a novice developer can work with it, versus Apache Kafka, which requires expertise.

My company found some Amazon Kinesis discrepancies, so it's looking forward to a more modernized solution from Apache Kafka.

One area for improvement in the solution is the file size limitation of 10 Mb. My company works with files with a larger file size.

The batch size and throughput also need improvement in Amazon Kinesis. The solution needs to be more open regarding the type of files for streaming and the streaming size. Amazon should not limit those aspects. It should be unlimited. If a company is ready to pay, why not make it unlimited?

What I want to add to Amazon Kinesis is modernization based on the container environment, where I can add containers and more workers. I also expect some human resources to be added and an SLA agreement with Amazon, if possible.

I've been using Amazon Kinesis for about one year, and I'm still using it.

Amazon Kinesis could be more stable. One of my clients rejected it, while some clients find it okay, stability-wise. I'd rate Amazon Kinesis stability as five out of ten.

I can rate Amazon Kinesis scalability according to the organization size and data load. For a small organization using the solution and Lambda with some transformation through AWS Glue, Amazon Kinesis is the best, scalability-wise. However, if you're dealing with a billion tuples, for example, the solution isn't as scalable, so I would go for Apache Spark or Apache Kafka to handle the load.

When I see that the processing takes longer than fifteen minutes with Lambda and the tenants fail, I use Apache Spark for processing, but that could take up to three or four days to be comparable to big data technologies.

I'd rate the scalability of Amazon Kinesis as four out of ten.

My company contacted some premium partners and technicians of Amazon Kinesis and found the technical support good, but with some limitations. I'd rate support a seven out of ten. Though it had limitations, the interaction with support was pleasant.

Neutral

In the future, my company plans to switch to Apache Kafka because it's very flexible and easier to manage. It's also easier to control and manage limits about topics. On the other hand, Amazon Kinesis has some limitations to its charts. It also has a 10 Mb limit to its file size, so if you have a 20 Mb file, you have to make it 10 Mb.

Amazon Kinesis is easy to set up, and it's a ten out of ten for me. Setting it up is a straightforward process.

My company set up Amazon Kinesis for the client.

If you ask a client about Amazon Kinesis pricing, the client usually says it's high. If you ask a business owner, the business owner would tell you that pricing for Amazon Kinesis is a little bit high. For each region, it's a little bit high.

There is a particular concern regarding Amazon Kinesis here in Pakistan because there's no zone in Pakistan. Amazon needs to develop zones here because Pakistan is the biggest country in the region after India. Amazon is losing a lot of business in Pakistan because there's no AWS zone here.

AWS also didn't accept my Pakistan credit card when I was trying to register with AWS. AWS should develop trust here in Pakistan and excellent AWS zones, so Pakistan businesses that want to purchase Amazon Kinesis won't need to depend on Singapore or India.

When I'm closing a deal with a new client, the client would ask, "Why do you need to sign up with a zone in India or Singapore to save data?" I don't have an answer to that question, so a workaround would be to develop on-premise environments for clients to save data.

Amazon Kinesis pricing is sometimes reasonable and sometimes could be better, depending on the planning, so it's a five out of ten for me.

Nowadays, my company works with AWS, Snowflake, Redshift, Amazon Kinesis, Firehose, Aurora, and Athena. In the future, my company plans to work with SAP HANA.

My rating for Amazon Kinesis is six out of ten.

My company is a user of Amazon Kinesis.

We are using Kinesis' third-party streaming engine. We are using the AWS cloud and are moving to Azure.

One of the best features of Amazon Kinesis is the multi-partition. 

Another valuable feature of Kinesis is that when it is down, and in the backup stage, the data is still available. 

Currently, Kinesis provides only seven days of retention support. It would be beneficial if this could be extended to upwards of 40 days or more. 

In the next future release, I would like to see a library that is Java-compliant. It would be beneficial if Amazon Kinesis provided document-based support on the internet to be able to read the data from the Kinesis site.

I have been using Amazon Kinesis for almost two years.

Amazon Kinesis is stable. I do not see any issues.

The solution is scalable. We have 20 team members using Kinesis.

We have not required support from Amazon.

The initial setup of Amazon Kinesis is easy. 

We have been looking for a streaming tool. We looked into Kafka, E-Hub, and Kinesis. Kafta is better than Kinesis as it has multiple cloud connectors. More features are available by default with Kafta.

Overall, I would rate Amazon Kinesis a seven out of ten.

In the simpler use case, we were just pumping in some data. We wanted a product, an AWS service, that would accept data in bursts. We were pushing in, for example, 500 records every 300 milliseconds. What I'm trying to say is per second we were trying to pump in around 1,500 records into some streaming services what we were looking at. That type of streaming information would then go into another source, for example Lambda. Then Lambda would consume the data and ultimately we would process and store it in DynamoDB.

This was the basic flow that we had. We were looking for a service. And at that point in time in our organization, the architects were asking us to leverage Kinesis to see how it performed. They wanted to see how it performs, so they were encouraging us to use it. Although we were looking at something as simple as SQS and SNS, they were encouraging us to use Kinesis and that is what we did. 

There were a few considerations when we moved Kinesis. What is the reliability? When I say reliability, I mean resilience, or the failure mechanism we thought was required for that use case because we did not want to lose data. Also, we wanted to have the ability to replay from a certain point because we were pumping in reports from a data source and we were always keeping track of the point at which we had stopped. So if we wanted to replay something from the prior data which was already processed by Kinesis, and it failed in the Lambda, we wanted to have the ability to retry and replay the previously processed stream.

That prompted us to use Kinesis because it has the really good feature of being able to replay for 24 hours whatever you've already processed and this allows us to replay it. That was one key feature that we thought we would need. In fact, performance-wise, it performed really well. We also understood that it is actually meant for streaming, video streaming and stuff like that. Even data streaming. It does a good job with it. But mostly, we saw that it is a more suitable service for video streaming simply because when we actually pump data into Kinesis, we don't know how to test it other than waiting for the data to come out of it from the other end and hook into Lambda and extract data out of it and process it.

That's the only way we can test it. That was a drawback but it did not matter too much. But it did matter in the next project, and for the bigger use cases where we used Kinesis. But this project was a simple use case and it served really well, so we kept it as-is. We moved on to the next project, which was bigger. It was an event-driven architecture that we were trying out on one of the features. When we went event-driven, at that time a few of the new features and new services from Amazon which are available right now, were not available.

We thought of using Kinesis again to stream the data from one microservice to another in a proper microservice architecture. We were using this as a communication medium between microservices. This is where the testing was a little complicated for us. Ultimately, what we realized out of the entire exercise was that Kinesis may not have been the right choice of service for us for our use case. But what we discovered were the benefits of using Kinesis and also the limitations in certain use cases.

The biggest lesson learned for us was even before you take up anything like Kinesis, which is a big AWS service, there has to be a POC, proof of concept, done. To see whether it really suits that use case or not. That is what we ultimately realized. Before that, there were a few other reasons why we chose Kinesis over DynamoDB streaming. Ultimately it was from one microservice to another, and each microservice had its own DynamoDB data store.

We were thinking of using the DynamoDB Stream and Kinesis to keep things simple. But it turned out that DynamoDB Streams have a limitation that whatever a stream comes out of DynamoDB it can be consumed only by a single client. But with Kinesis it doesn't matter. Any number of data sources can come in and whatever Kinesis publishes can be consumed by any number of clients. That is why we went with Kinesis in order to see how it performed. Because even performance-wise, we found that we need a crazy load server because we are part of the wagering industry, which needs peak performance. Online betting. In Australia, it's a regulated market and one of the most happening businesses. Here, performance is really important, because there are quite a few competitors, around 10 to 15 prominent competitors and if we have to stand out, our performance has to be beyond the customer's expectation.

So, with that in mind, they knew our performance had to scale up. That is where we found the advantage of using Kinesis. It's been reliable. It has not failed to publish. It actually did fail, but the failure was simply because of pumping in too much data than what Kinesis can take in.

There is a limit that we discovered. I don't remember the numbers there. But we did manage to break Kinesis by pumping in too much data.

The major advantage with Amazon Kinesis is the availability. Additionally, the reliability is awesome when it comes to Kinesis. Kinesis also offers the replay.

It is incredibly fast. The ingesting of data, the buffering, and processing the data are really fast. With AWS you always get the the dashboard for monitoring. That is a really good aspect for us to see how Kinesis is performing. Otherwise there is no other way for us to know what's happening within Kinesis other than the Lambda kicking in and processing. So the Lambda logs were indirectly necessary for us to look into Kinesis.

The dashboarding AWS provides out of the box for monitoring the performance of benefits is quite nice. Also, it is a self-managed service so we don't need to worry about what happens behind Kinesis. That was another big win for us. We did not have to worry about how to maintain or manage Kinesis in general. That was a consideration. It is kind of server-less. 

The scalability was quite acceptable. It can handle a large amount of data as well. It can take in a large amount of data, but there is a limit. It can take a huge amount of data and process it from many sources. We can have any number of data sources coming in, and it can ingest all of them and publish it to wherever you want.

You can design your code in such a way that the Lambda that actually processes whatever is published by Kinesis can kind of segregate the data coming in from multiple data sources, based on the logic that is implemented there. That is a nice feature. Ingesting data from multiple sources, and being able to publish it to multiple destinations.

The feature that I've found most valuable is the replay. That is one of the most valuable in our business. We are business-to-business so replay was an important feature - being able to replay for 24 hours. That's an important feature.

In our use case Kinesis was able to handle the rate at which we were pumping in data and it could publish the data to whatever destination, be it Lambda or any other consumer.

We were seeing that there was a delay in the amount of processing time of the Lambda and the subsequent storing into DynamoDB. There was a delay in that process. So, at the rate at which we were pumping in the data, it was obvious we had ensured that this should work. This rate at which we were pumping it is the rate at which the data is published and processed, as well. But we saw that it was not working. Not the Kinesis data nor the subsequent parts of our application, they tended to not be up to the mark with Kinesis. So the business asked us for the ability to be able to get back to a certain point in time and replay the entire thing. That way there is a record if there is an error when it is being processed.

The ordering is another big thing for us. Kinesis is known for maintaining the order in which the data is ingested. We can tweak that and can configure Kinesis to ensure that the ordering is maintained. The order in which the data is actually being published is also important for us. That is why the business was ok even if a thousand record failed to process, because they were okay to start from 500 again, and again reach a thousand. They wanted to ensure that there was no scope for failure there. That is why the replay feature was useful for us. That is why both performance and replay are important. When I say performance, I mean the reliability. Kinesis has an inbuilt replay mechanism that also came in handy for us.

These were the crucial things that we were looking at, and it worked quite well.

In general, the pain point for us was that once the data gets into Kinesis there is no way for us to understand what's happening because Kinesis divides everything into shards. So if we wanted to understand what's happening with a particular shard, whether it is published or not, we could not. Even with the logs, if we want to have some kind of logging it is in the shard. That is something that we thought we needed then, but later we realized that Kinesis was not built for that. They must have already improved by now, because I have not been in touch with AWS for the last five, six months since I joined this organization which uses Azure. I did not get to experiment with AWS Kinesis too much after that.

It was built for something else, but we used Kinesis for one purpose and we were expecting a feature out of it that may not have really been the design of the service when they built Kinesis. It was almost like a black box for us, because once the data comes in we need to rely on the Lambda itself to let us know. Because if some Kinesis code is coming in, it processes that we will log back in using the Lambda. And that is where we would know, "Oh, okay this guy has come in, this guy has come in." We hoped for a better way of being able to track the shard being processed or how they streamed within Kinesis.

We wanted to have a look at that, but that was not available then. It may not even be available now. We did not have the feature that we expected in the first place from Kinesis. Overall that was the only thing that we felt was lacking. Our use case may not have been the most ideal one, but other than that we did not have many qualms with Kinesis. Overall, we felt we would have simplified the entire design of what we did by simply using an SNS and SQS, because we have much better visibility in terms of tracking what happens within the SNS and SQS.

I have used Amazon Kinesis for a couple of projects starting from August 2019 until July 2020. I used Amazon Kinesis in exactly two projects in fact, one after the other.

In terms of scalability, there is a limit which is documented by Amazon. But when we started using it, we didn't know that. We did not evaluate its complete documentation. Of course we went through the aspects that we wanted to understand and we made the choice. But it did break at a certain point.

It was okay for us simply because we could do with a lower pumping rate. So, it did not cause too much of a hazard for the business as such, but we did manage to break Kinesis.

Overall, what we realized was for event driven architecture for simple use cases where you need reliable streaming, Amazon Kinesis works really well. But, for event driven it may not be the best choice.

That's what we figured out at the end of our project. The project was successful. It served its purpose. But the amount of support that we had to provide to see that the entire infrastructure holds up to the load was high.

We felt that we could have done with an easier adaptation of the same architecture. We could have gone with an easier implementation, by probably choosing SNS and SQS over Kinesis in our use case. So, lessons learned.

This is all that we worked on with Kinesis. This is what we figured out after close to a year of working with it. One project was no problem at all. Whatever the purpose, Kinesis did more than expected. And, in the other one we kind of hit the boiling point of Kinesis and realized that it may not be the right choice in that scenario. But it was still okay. We still left it there, and it served its purpose.

We had an Amazon technical advisor who was visiting us once every week on the same day. He would be with us and he would just be there and we could reach out to him and ask him for suggestions as to what we could use and what we should do. He would help us with whatever queries we would give him. Even if he did not know he went back to the Amazon experts and then he would get us the answers. But, in this case for Kinesis, it was more driven by the architecture teams here, for us to try it out and see how it performs.

We did go to the Amazon technical support guy who was available for us to understand the limitations and the use cases. He did help us, but we were deep into our implementation when we went to him so we could not change or accommodate because we were almost at the end of the implementation. But, yes his inputs were definitely valuable for us to understand Kinesis better.

In terms of initial setup, Kinesis is available for us to use. All we need to do is see what stack we are using. For example, our stack consists of a Lambda, Kinesis stream, DynamoDB, and some data source that is probably another Lambda or something. So Lambda feeds data into Kinesis and Kinesis publishes it into another Lambda. I'm just giving an example. All these four components come under a certain stack so there's not much to set up other than ensuring that it's part of a used CloudFormation for ensuring that we maintain stacks separately. Kinesis had to be part of the stack and data CloudFormation stack template and also it needs permissions from the data source of both source and destination. We just need to give permission to those data sources to be able to access Kinesis. Other than that, there's nothing much to set up because Kinesis is a self managed service.

We were four developers and one principal developer who were taking us from the architecture standpoint during setup.

I think there is a paid version only, there is no free version. I think it is possibly on the expensive side.

I did not go too deep into pricing, because our business did not care about pricing that much. They just wanted the product to be solid and level at all times. The business is generally conservative about services and pricing. But, this was a different case for us where the price did not matter.

I did not explore that much into the pricing of Kinesis, per se.

I'm aware of Costco streaming, but I have not used it in any project. This was the only streaming service that I used.

Here, we mostly use Azure Web Apps, Azure Web Jobs and the function apps, which are similar to Lambda. The exposure that I'm seeing is not as extensive here. It is not as extensive as it was for me in my previous organization. In the previous organization the entire infrastructure was on cloud, but here in my current organization it's partially on cloud. So the exposure into many Azure services is limited at this point.

With my limited exposure to Kinesis, and with the pain points and probably not using it properly, we did see that it was successful. Having said all that, and the pain points that we went through, on a scale of one to ten I would give Kinesis an eight out of 10.

Our primary use case of this solution is as an intricate part of our data pipeline to deal with all of our big data problems. The traffic in our industry is highly volatile. At any given time we could have 10,000 users, and five minutes later it could be 100,000. We need systems fast enough to deal with that elasticity of demand, and the ability to deal with all the big data problems. Volume, velocity, ferocity, things like that. That's where we use the Kinesis platform. They have different iterations of it. The normal Kinesis Stream, is a little bit more manual, but we use that for our legacy technology, and for the more recent ones, we use Kinesis Firehose.

We dynamically change some of our product offerings based on user interaction. We can respond faster to user behavior, rather than waiting for the data to be at rest. We run some analytics models, and can then react in real time.

When it comes to Kinesis Firehose, the most valuable feature is the auto-scaling. It does auto-sharing, auto-correction, things like that and responds dynamically. Secondly, it innately has all the features of our reliable data pipeline, allowing you to store raw documents and transform data on the fly. When data comes into the stream through Firehose, we can see it and analyze every single object, keep the raw objects, carry out some transformations on it in flight, and then put it at rest. It allows us to do some real time analytics using Kinesis Analytics. We do anomaly detection in flight as well. We receive any changes with regards to user patterns and behaviors, in real time because Kinesis allows that.

They recently expanded the feature sets, but when we were implementing it, it could only deliver to one platform. I'm not sure where it's at now but multiple platforms would be beneficial. I'd also like to have some ability to do first in, first out queuing. If I put several messages into Firehose, there's no guarantee that everything will be processed in the order it was sent. 

We've had no problems with stability and we implemented well over a year ago. 

The scalability of this solution is good. We are using it extensively with pretty much every single one of the flows.

The technical support could be improved. They tend to send you back to the documentation. 

We switched to Kinesis because of the technical complexity of the previous solution. In the previous solution, Ops would write feeds on the SQS queue, and then it required physical machines to connect, pull the data, transform it and write. That required three or four different technologies. Kinesis has removed a lot of technical complexity to the architecture.

The initial setup was straightforward. Both the user interface and the programmatic access is very intuitive. And again, it's not difficult, even non-technical people would be able to set it up. It took two people to implement. I was responsible for data architecture and we had a developer to transform the data inside. Deployment took less than an hour. The documentation was very helpful. 

We've been able to drop our costs for ingesting data by about 60 to 70%.

We didn't evaluate anything else because no other product offered that type of fast solution at the time. Whatever we looked at added technical complexity to the architecture.

It's important to think about how you are going to fix the end points that connect to your Kinesis files.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

As part of my interest in obtaining Amazon certification and learning more about Kinesis, I am currently using it to capture streaming Twitter data.

I get an avalanche of tweets and I need some technology to harness and capture them. I have used the streaming Twitter API to deal with it. Twitter is updated every half a second, so I'm tapping into the streaming API and capturing a lot of stuff.

It has also been used for the Internet of Things (IoT), where there is a lot of streaming stuff that comes out and you need a mechanism to capture all of it from your devices. This includes things such as logs. My company was recently working on a project with Kinesis where we were capturing data from racecars.

These racecars were emitting tons of data and it needed to be captured by some kind of tool for analytics. Kinesis was used to capture all of that information. The basic use case is just capturing the data. In the streams, you can do some sort of interim transformations but for the most part, the basic use case is just capturing data and persisting it in a data store like Amazon S3. Another example is Elastic MapReduce permanent storage. Once it lands in some kind of permanent store, further transformations or aggregations can be done at that point.

In the racecar project that we worked on, the client wanted to be able to capture metrics in real-time to allow for the adjustment of racing strategy.

The most valuable feature is that it has a pretty robust way of capturing things. You can capture things from the beginning, or start capturing tweets at a certain point in time.

It has some good fault tolerance in case something breaks.

It's really easy to implement, get started, and use.

With AWS, you don't have to invest in any kind of infrastructure. All you have to do is go to the portal, create an account, turn it on, and use a few lines of Python code in order to capture what you're looking for.

The Kinesis API is really easy to put information on the shards. You just need to enter a few lines of code.

I'm currently trying to figure out production rates and consumption rates for data. If there were better documentation on optimal sharding strategies then it would be helpful. 

I think that this product is very stable and very fault-tolerant. 

As part of consuming data off of the stream, you do get some sort of unique number that is somewhat sequential. This means that if you have a problem with the data and something breaks, you can simply go back to that location in the stream.

Imagine that it gives you an integer, 100, to indicate your point in the stream. Then, if something fails, at a later point in time you can go back to spot 101 and continue retrieving data inside the stream. It's very fault-tolerant.

The product is very scalable. Especially on the cloud, there is a large advantage.

I haven't needed to contact technical or customer support.

I am familiar with Kafka, although I have never used it.

Compared to Kafka, which requires physical servers, Kinesis, being on the cloud, is very easy to implement. It is a little easier to use, as well. Anybody who is interested in using it does not have to invest any money in a server or invest time in setting things up and configuring it on an actual environment with Kafka. All they have to do is go to AWS and turn it on.

I don't have any experience with other streaming analytics solutions.

If someone knows what they're doing, they can have something up and running in half an hour. You can certainly use a deployment strategy, although I haven't to this point. I've just done it on my desktop, locally, in an IDE called PyCharm.

One can go ahead and deploy to an Amazon EC2 instance or AWS Beanstalk. I chose not to do this because it's easier for my project.

I think as far as maintenance is concerned, you just kind of have to watch the production and the consumption of your data. You just have to make sure that everything's in order. They have metrics on the AWS console to help keep an eye on that kind of stuff but once it's up and running, you really don't have to do a whole lot of maintenance.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to start by reading through the Amazon documentation, as well as go through some videos on YouTube or Pluralsight just to get a high-level idea of what's going on. Then, start experimenting and trying to figure out how it works. From there, try to figure out how to choose your optimal sharding strategy, like how many shards do you need within the stream and how you want to partition the data within it.

I think from there, you need to look at your production and consumption rates on the stream. This is how much data you are putting onto the stream and at what kind of rate. You need to make sure that you're consuming data off of the stream, also, and look at that rate too.

The ideal use case is to be able to consume data faster than producing because then you're able to control things. If you're not able to do that, then you could get overwhelmed.

The biggest lesson that I learned from using this product is that it's a whole new world of processing big data. I come from a traditional data warehousing background where everything is batch-oriented. So for this, this is a whole new ball game in terms of how to process data. It's a new mechanism for harnessing the power of data. A traditional data warehouse could not analyze, for example, what is going on in real-time on a racing car. It's not scalable and it's not going to work. However, something like this is dynamic and big enough to handle this kind of application.

This is a pretty good product, albeit I don't have much to compare it with. That said, I don't have any problems with it. It's done what it's asked and it's easy to use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.