Amazon Web Services announces Amazon Kinesis

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a new managed service for real-time processing of high volume, streaming data named Amazon Kinesis. Using Amazon Kinesis, a customer can store and process terabytes of data an hour from hundreds of thousands of sources, making it easy to write applications that take action on real-time data such as web site click-streams, marketing and financial transactions, social media feeds, logs and metering data and location-tracking events.
 
Amazon Kinesis-enabled applications can power real-time dashboards, generate alerts, drive real-time business decisions such as changing pricing and advertising strategies or send data to other big data services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) or Amazon Redshift. Amazon Kinesis scales elastically to support applications that process data streams of nearly any size, while replicating all data across multiple Availability Zones to help ensure high durability and availability.
 
Terry Hanold, Vice-President of New Business Initiatives, AWS, said, 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.
 
With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, or through a simple API call, customers can create a data “stream” that reliably captures and stores data as it is submitted, making it available to applications, open-source streaming tools, and data stores (e.g. Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon Redshift).