Are you an Amazon Web Services customer looking for a new way to process streaming data in real-time? Well, you might have heard of a new service from AWS called Kinesis. It was previously only available to a few as part of a limited preview, but Amazon is now letting it out of the gate.
Amazon Web Services announced today that Kinesis is now available to all its customers. It says the new service will help businesses and developers create applications that “take action on real-time data, and location-tracking events.” While this functionality can already be built into apps, AWS notes that many developers have to built it themselves and is oftentimes unreliable. With Kinesis, AWS promises a service that can do all the heavy lifting without developers having to lift a finger.
“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 streaming data in real-time,” said Terry Hanold, Vice President, Cloud Commerce, AWS. “We’ve gotten 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.”
So, how does Amazon Kinesis work in the real world? A few developers have had access to it for a while and shared their thoughts on what Kinesis has helped them achieve. The best example comes from Supercell, a mobile games developer that has a very real need for real-time data services.
“Our player base has scaled at an incredible pace. Using AWS means we can rely on AWS tools in managing our infrastructure to match our growth,” said Sami Yliharju, Services Lead at Supercell. “We are using Amazon Kinesis for real-time delivery of game insight data sent by hundreds of our game engine servers. Amazon Kinesis enables our business-critical analytics and dashboard applications to reliably get the data streams they need, without delays. Amazon Kinesis also offloads a lot of developer burden in building a real-time, streaming data ingestion platform, and enables Supercell to focus on delivering games that delight players worldwide.”
In a completely different use case scenario, Bizo, a B2B digital marketing platform, utilized Kinesis to free up their engineers’ time so they could work on advancing the company’s technology instead of maintaining what was already there.
“Our business runs with a talented but small engineering staff; tools that save us time and reduce operational complexity allow us to focus on innovation,” said Donnie Flood, Vice President of Engineering at Bizo. “An Amazon Kinesis-based pipeline allows us to replace our existing, batch-oriented, data ingestion and aggregation mechanism, which forms the backbone of our data pipeline and reporting infrastructure. This reduces our operational burden and frees up our engineers’ time to focus on building targeted advertising solutions for our clients while Amazon Kinesis does the heavy lifting of scaling elastically in response to our growing business.”
If you want to learn more about Kinesis, you can do so here.
As a bonus, here’s a video that explains in greater detail what Kinesis can do for your app or business:
Image via Amazon Web Services/YouTube
