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Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

What is it​

A fully managed service for loading real-time streaming data into destinations such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Splunk.

What it's for​

Simplify the ingestion and delivery of streaming data for storage and analysis, without the need to manage servers or write consumer applications.

Use cases​

  • Loading application and system logs to S3 for later analysis
  • Ingesting clickstream data into data warehouses like Redshift
  • Sending event data to OpenSearch Service for monitoring and visualization
  • Collecting IoT data for real-time analysis

Key points​

  • Fully managed: No servers to provision or manage
  • Real-time delivery: Delivers data in seconds to configured destinations
  • Data transformation: Can transform, compress, and encrypt data before delivery
  • Automatic scaling: Automatically scales to handle streaming data volume
  • Integration: Integrates with Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Agent, and other AWS services

Comparison with AWS Kinesis Data Streams​

  • Kinesis Data Firehose: Simpler to use for ingesting data into specific destinations, without the need to develop consumer applications. Ideal for use cases where data transformation and delivery are standardized.
  • Kinesis Data Streams: Offers more control and flexibility for developing custom applications that consume and process real-time streaming data. You manage the shards and capacity, allowing for more complex processing logic.