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Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (What is?, Benefits, Terminologies)

What is Amazon Kinesis Data Streams?

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams service is one of the four services provided by the amazon kinesis family services and it's used for streaming your data and just take care of that. It doesn't stream videos, it only streams data.
So amazon kinesis data streams is considered to be an alternative to the streaming service which is Apache Kafka.

It's a serverless streaming data service which is capable of capturing, processing and storing data streams in real time.
Note: take care that real time is a keyword for amazon kinesis data streams in the exam, you could also see a keyword like near real time which is considered to be a key word for the amazon kinesis data firehose.

The amazon kinesis data streams, manages the infrastructure storage, networking and configuration for your stream.

It's useful for moving your data of the data producer.
So a data producer is obviously something that produces data. It could be a micro service or also it could be a sensor and then you could use as lambda and amazon kinesis data streams in order to process the data from the kinesis data streams.

So if you can imagine the whole image, you have a sensor sending its data to an amazon kinesis data streams and amazon kinesis data streams streaming, your data coming from this sensor to an AWS lambda or an amazon kinesis data streams which responds by.

So if you have an AWS lambda it could respond by functions you can make some conditions and the amazon kinesis data streams could perform analytics on your data.

It could also build custom applications which run on amazon EC2, Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS using either the amazon kinesis API or the amazon kinesis client library and for short KCL.

Important Terminologies

  • Shards: a combination and a uniquely identified sequence of data records.

  • Retention Period: the length of the time in which the data records are being accessible after they are being added to the stream.

  • Producers: they are the ones that put records into the amazon kinesis data streams.

  • Consumers: They're like retrieving the records from the kinesis data streams and processing them.

Kinesis Data Streams Benefits

kinesis data streams is being elastic in a way that you could scale your stream up or down.
Applications could consume data from the same stream. So the same stream could have multiple consumers.
It is a serverless service, that means, it manages the infrastructure storage, networking and configuration for your stream.
It also replicates your data across three availability zones.
So you don't need to worry about the availability of your stream before the amazon kinesis data streams.

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