Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the release of Amazon Kinesis, a revolutionary service for storing real-time data feeds that allows developers to write applications that respond to streaming data. Kinesis allows developers to store data from hundreds of sources and subsequently write applications that respond to real-time feeds related to streaming news feeds, financial data, social media applications and log and sensor data. Kinsesis integrates with real-time dashboards and business intelligence software and thereby enables the scripting of alerts and decision making protocols that respond to the trajectories of incoming real-time data. Terry Hanold, Vice President of New Business Initiatives, AWS, remarked on the innovation enabled by Amazon Kinesis as follows:
Database and MapReduce technologies are good at handling large volumes of data. But they are fundamentally batch-based, and struggle with enabling real-time decisions on a never-ending–and never fully complete–stream of data. Amazon Kinesis aims to fill this gap, removing many of the cost, effort and expertise barriers customers encounter with streaming data solutions, while providing the performance, durability and scale required for the largest, most advanced implementations.
Kinesis replicates data across Availability Zones within an AWS Region in order to ensure a high degree of availability. In addition, the product offers a managed service for dealing with incoming streams of real-time data that includes load balancing, failover, auto-scaling and orchestration. Moreover, customers can send incoming data to data stores such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon Redshift either in its raw form, or filtered according to business rules in order to reduce the size of the data store. Overall, Kinesis represents a truly disruptive technology that promises to change the way applications respond to continuous, dynamic data feeds. Use cases for the product include applications that leverage meteorological data, military-related sensor-based data, data streams from the emerging internet of things such as automobiles and appliances, in addition to the typical use case of web-related data. Amazon Web Services continues to push the envelope with respect to technological innovation and proves, once again, that it is so much more than an infrastructure as a service vendor that rents commodity hardware for application development and storage. Google and Microsoft look archaic in comparison, and as such, Amazon Web Services continues to consolidate its position as the cloud-based technology platform of choice for application development and integration.
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