In the age of digital transformation, enterprises are experiencing unprecedented growth of data streams in multiple formats of enterprise systems. As data is the key competitive edge of any business to make informed and real-time decisions, it is vital to streamline the process of data collection, processing, and analysis in real-time. Doing this job requires immense infrastructure and skilled professionals. AWS enables businesses to have better data management and get insights in real-time. The Amazon Kinesis feature provides timely insights from various types of data streams.

What is AWS Kinesis?

According to AWS, Amazon Kinesis simplifies the process of collecting, processing, and analyzing real-time and streaming data (video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and so on) to enable businesses to acquire timely insights quickly. Without having to categorize data and then provide to systems to analyze the data, AWS Kinesis allows the business to source all data and Kinesis then analyzes, categorizes and provides minute-by-minute analytics based on business needs. In short, it translates raw data into actionable insights. It facilitates easy integration with other AWS modules like Amazon S3, Dynamo DB, Redshift, and other big data modules.

AWS Kinesis Features

Video Streams

AWS is solving Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry challenges in delivering content across various types of devices. AWS Kinesis video streams are one of the capabilities that is positioning AWS as a solution for the M&E industry. This capability facilitates uninterrupted streaming of video data securely from any number of devices to AWS. Kinesis scales the infrastructure automatically to accommodate varying video streams. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics analyses live video data (computer vision application) and real-time data, then provides useful insights, which helps to understand audience trends and recommend personalized content, improving user experience.

Kinesis Data Streams

This robust, real-time data streaming facility allows businesses to capture gigabytes of data in just one second from various business systems and applications. The data is sent to Kinesis data streams. The data streams are stored for processing and analysis. Based on these analytics, custom or real-time applications can be built using AWS SDK. The Kinesis data streams can handle terabytes of data in an hour. Confidential data can be securely accessed using a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Kinesis Data Firehose

Firehose facilitates data collection, sourcing, and processing in just a few clicks. Without having to monitor this tool, Data Firehose is a completely controlled facility that scales infrastructure and applications automatically based on the incoming data stream. Developers can build applications on Data Firehose using the AWS management console.

Data Analytics

Based on the data sourced from Kinesis data streams and video streams, Kinesis data analytics easily transforms data and generates analytics based on specific queries. To raise queries, users are provided with built-in templates to modify the query according to the business need. Analytics can be viewed in dashboards or can be sourced to applications to create alerts.

How AWS Kinesis Improves Business

Real-Time Analytics

Traditional approaches of data analytics use a batch processing methodology, whereas AWS Kinesis can generate real-time analytics. Using accurate, real-time data, businesses can even train machine learning models more efficiently.

Highly Scalable

The beauty of the AWS cloud is its scalability, the same can be said about AWS' services too. Often thousands of devices and applications source a wide variety of data, AWS Kinesis can atomically scale infrastructure and resources to handle varying data streams with minimal latencies.

Robust Security

Data streams are highly secured by Identity and Access Management. It facilitates data protection by default using Key Management Service Keys and secures data during transmission using TLS protocols. It also enables private access to data using VPCs. Data Firehose supports Splunk to monitor and alert businesses of any threats.