Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made its Kinesis data processing service generally available, one month after it was announced at the company's Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.
Kinesis takes real-time data from sources as diverse as Twitter or network logs, which can then be stored and/or processed in real time. According to AWS, this makes it easy for customers to write applications such as dashboards or generate alerts to monitor data, or it can be sent to big data services like Elastic Map Reduce or RedShift for further processing.
According to AWS’ CTO Werner Vogels, the near-instantaneous nature of the insights generated by the offering makes Kinesis preferable to other big data analytics services like Hadoop, which are limited by being batch processing systems that cannot deal with data in real-time.
Terry Hanold, vice president of cloud commerce at AWS, said: “When we set out to build Amazon Kinesis, we wanted to eliminate the cost, effort, and expertise barriers that have prevented our customers from processing [and] streaming data in real-time.
“We've [received] great feedback from our preview customers, and it’s inspiring to see the innovative ways customers are using Amazon Kinesis, across applications as diverse as gaming, mobile, advertising, manufacturing, healthcare, e-commerce, and financial services.”
According to Vogels, as Kinesis is a fully managed service there is no need for developers to carry out time-consuming and costly integration. He added that at $5 (£3.07) per hour and with the ability to process terabytes of data in that time, it is a cost effective option for real-time analytics.
