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Amazon Kinesis

Score9.6 out of 10

23 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Amazon Kinesis?

Amazon Kinesis is a streaming analytics suite for data intake from video or other disparate sources and applying analytics for machine learning (ML) and business intelligence.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Amazon Kinesis has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 23 ratings of Amazon Kinesis's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Real-Time Data Analysis

    Ability to analyze data in motion

    Category average: 8.5

  • Data wrangling and preparation

    Tools to rapidly prepare data for analysis by normalization, data cleansing, etc.

    Category average: 7.8

  • Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources

    Ability to ingest data from many sources including Internet of Things (IoT) endpoint data, stock trading data etc, as well as static data

    Category average: 8.7

Areas for Improvement

  • Integrated Development Tools

    Tools to allow developers to rapidly create streaming applications via a graphical user interface and selection of predefined functions and operators

    Category average: 7.5

  • Linear Scale-Out

    Easy to scale out or scale down by visually changing the resource allocation. This allows changes in load or traffic to be handled without interruptions

    Category average: 7.5

  • Data Enrichment

    Ability to enrich the data stream with static reference data

    Category average: 7.7

Reviews

What users are saying about Amazon Kinesis.
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Amazon Kinesis Review

Incentivized
Francisco Javier Castañeda Marroquín
CEO (Chief Executive Officer) in Corporate at Global Bestlogistics Systems S.A. de C.V. (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Integrating with other Amazon services
  • Scaling requests
  • Totally serverless platform
  • Simple management

Cons

  • Extended fan-out is complicated to manage.
  • Documentation is confusing.
  • VPC integration

Return on Investment

  • Lower the cost of implementation.
  • Good scaling up
  • Simple integration, especially with Lambda

Alternatives Considered

AWS Lambda, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Glue

Other Software Used

AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, AWS Glue

Using Kinesis to stream billions of messages in a day, over millions of connected devices on the field

Incentivized
Verified User
Executive in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Processing huge loads of data
  • Integrating well with IoT Platform on Amazon
  • Integration with overall AWS Ecosystem
  • Scalability

Cons

  • Improve integration with AWS Lambda
  • Some duplicate records coming from the stream

Return on Investment

  • Significantly reduced the cost of our IoT platform, compared to other Cloud providers.
  • Better user experience.
  • Enabled real "real-time analytics."

Alternatives Considered

Apache Kafka

Other Software Used

Tableau Server, Amazon Redshift, Apache Spark

Don't confuse Kinesis with a Queue system.

Incentivized
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Information Technology (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Link DynamoDB change events directly to Lambda
  • Fast streaming of events
  • Easy to "tail" changes/latest events

Cons

  • Not a queue system, so little visibility into "backlog" if there is any
  • Confusing terminology to make sure events aren't missed
  • Sometimes didn't seem to trigger Lambda functions, or dropped events when a lot came in

Return on Investment

  • Caused us to need to re-engineer some basic re-try logic
  • Caused us to drop some content without knowing it
  • Made monitoring much more difficult
  • We eventually switched back to SQS because Kinesis is not the same as a Queue system

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Other Software Used

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway