We live in a world driven by data and every second we are processing a large amount of data, using it, analysing it, and transforming it. Data is very essential for businesses these days. Therefore the need for handling the Dynamically generating data is important. As the number, variety, and velocity of data sources grow, new architectures and technologies are needed. This is where the need for data streaming services is needed. One of these streaming services is AWS Kinesis data stream.
What is Kinesis data stream?
Kinesis data stream is a real time data streaming service from AWS. It is a highly scalable service which can stream gigabytes of data per second. It is a highly fast streaming service enabling us to collect data in real-time instantly.
Common challenges in data streaming:
- Complex setup
- Scalability
- Hard to achieve high availability
- Integration requires development
- Expensive to maintain.
Why choose Kinesis data streams?
There are different streaming services available on the market but why and when should we use Kinesis data stream? To answer this question let us look at some advantages of it.
- Easy to use: It allows us to rapidly develop applications by providing us AWS SDK, Kinesis Client library, connectors and agents which are. Easily process data with built-in integrations to AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, and AWS Glue Schema Registry.
- Real-time performance: highly fast streaming service enabling us to collect data in real-time instantly.
- Elastic: Dynamically scale your applications. These data streams scale from megabytes to terabytes per hour, and scale from thousands to millions of PUT records per second.
- Low cost: It has no upfront cost, and you only pay for the resources you use.
How does Kinesis Data stream works?
It’s very easy to understand the working of Kinesis Firehose and to get started with it.
- Create a Kinesis data stream using AWS console or SDK.
- Provide data stream configuration in the data source so that it can send data to Kinesis data stream. You can also create a custom producer to send data to the stream.
- Once the Kinesis starts receiving data from the source you can decide to use Other AWS services to put data like AWS Kinesis data analytics, AWS EC2, AWS Lambda for processing, Spark or build your own custom consumer for ingesting and processing.
Where can I use Kinesis Data streams?
- Log and event data collection: It can be used to collect log and event data from sources such as servers, desktops, and mobile devices.
- Real-time analytics: You can have your Kinesis Applications run real-time analytics on high frequency event data such as sensor data collected by Data Streams, which enables you to gain insights from your data at a frequency of minutes instead of hours or days.
- Mobile data capture: You can have your mobile applications push data to Data Streams from hundreds of thousands of devices, making the data available to you as soon as it is produced on the mobile devices.
- Gaming data feed: It can be used to continuously collect data about player-game interactions and feed the data into your gaming platform.
So now we have a basic understanding of what Kinesis data streams data stream is and how and where we can leverage it to make our lives easier!
For more blogs on AWS check out Knoldus blogs.
You can check out the documentation here.
