Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Amazon Kinesis VS AWS IoT Core

Compare Amazon Kinesis VS AWS IoT Core and see what are their differences

Amazon Kinesis logo Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis services make it easy to work with real-time streaming data in the AWS cloud.

AWS IoT Core logo AWS IoT Core

Whether building a connected home application for home security or building an industrial application to proactively identify equipment breakdown, you can use AWS IoT Core to securely communicate with and gather data from your diverse fleet of IoT d…
  • Amazon Kinesis Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-28
  • AWS IoT Core Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-02-05

Amazon Kinesis features and specs

  • Real-time data processing
    Amazon Kinesis allows for real-time processing of data streams, enabling rapid ingestion and analysis of data as it arrives.
  • Scalability
    Kinesis is highly scalable and can handle massive volumes of streaming data, expanding automatically to meet your needs.
  • Fully managed service
    As a fully managed service, Kinesis handles infrastructure maintenance, provisioning, and scaling, reducing operational overhead.
  • Integration with AWS ecosystem
    Kinesis integrates seamlessly with other AWS services such as Lambda, Redshift, S3, and Elasticsearch, facilitating comprehensive data workflows.
  • Multiple data stream applications
    The service supports different types of data stream applications including data delivery, analytics, and real-time processing, making it versatile.
  • Security
    Offers robust security through integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption at rest with AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and in-transit encryption.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon Kinesis

  • Cost
    While pricing is scalable, costs can escalate quickly with high data throughput and storage requirements, potentially becoming expensive for large-scale implementations.
  • Complex setup and management
    Despite being a managed service, the initial setup and tuning of Kinesis can be complex and may require specialized knowledge.
  • Latency
    Although designed for real-time data processing, there can be minor latency involved that might not fit ultra-low latency requirements.
  • Limited data retention
    Kinesis typically supports up to 7 days of data retention in streams, which might be insufficient for use cases requiring longer retention periods without extra storage solutions.
  • API Rate Limits
    API access to Kinesis is subject to rate limits, which could impact applications requiring high-frequency data ingestion and retrieval.
  • Dependence on AWS services
    Tight integration with AWS services can pose a challenge for organizations looking for a multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic strategy.

AWS IoT Core features and specs

  • Scalability
    AWS IoT Core can automatically scale to accommodate billions of devices and trillions of messages, making it suitable for both small and large IoT deployments.
  • Integration with AWS Services
    Seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, such as AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB, allowing for complex workflows and data processing.
  • Security
    Provides robust security features including mutual authentication, end-to-end encryption, and fine-grained access control to protect data.
  • Device Management
    Offers features for managing device fleets, such as registering devices, managing permissions, and monitoring connectivity status.
  • MQTT Support
    Supports the popular MQTT protocol, which is lightweight and ideal for connecting remote devices with minimal bandwidth.
  • Serverless Architecture
    Supports a serverless approach, which reduces the need for infrastructure management and allows developers to focus more on building applications.

Possible disadvantages of AWS IoT Core

  • Complex Pricing
    The pricing structure can be complex, involving costs for messaging, data transfer, and other AWS services, which can make it challenging to estimate costs accurately.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    The platform's extensive features and broad integration options can be overwhelming for new users or those unfamiliar with AWS services.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Using AWS IoT Core can lead to potential vendor lock-in due to the deep integration with the broader suite of AWS services.
  • Latency
    Depending on the geographical location of devices and nearest AWS regions, there may be concerns about latency for time-sensitive applications.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    Primarily designed for cloud connectivity, so offline capabilities might require additional configuration or third-party solutions.

Analysis of Amazon Kinesis

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Amazon Kinesis is a good option for organizations that need to process and analyze large streams of data in real-time. Its scalability, ease of integration with existing AWS infrastructure, and advanced features make it a preferred choice for many enterprise-level applications.

Why this product is good

  • Amazon Kinesis is generally considered a robust choice for real-time data processing because it can ingest, buffer, and process streaming data at scale. It offers features like durable storage, the ability to handle high throughput with low latency, and seamless integration with other AWS services. This makes it particularly well-suited for applications that require real-time analytics, data lake integrations, or reacting to changing data streams with minimal delay.

Recommended for

  • Organizations dealing with large quantities of streaming data
  • Businesses needing real-time data analytics and processing
  • Developers looking for seamless integration with AWS services
  • Teams wanting to build real-time machine learning models
  • Companies implementing IoT solutions requiring data streaming

Amazon Kinesis videos

AWS Big Data - Amazon Kinesis Analytics Introduction and Demonstration

More videos:

  • Review - Analyzing Data Streams in Real Time with Amazon Kinesis: PNNL's Serverless Data Lake Ingestion

AWS IoT Core videos

Getting Started with AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN

More videos:

  • Review - How can I start publishing messages to AWS IoT Core from my device?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon Kinesis and AWS IoT Core)
Stream Processing
100 100%
0% 0
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100
Data Management
100 100%
0% 0
Analytics
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Amazon Kinesis and AWS IoT Core

Amazon Kinesis Reviews

Top 10 AWS ETL Tools and How to Choose the Best One | Visual Flow
Amazon Kinesis was built to handle massive amounts of data, allowing it to be uploaded to a Redshift cluster. After the event stream is read and the data is transformed, it is placed into a table in Amazon SCTS in an Amazon ES domain. Thus, there is no need to use a server (instead, you need to integrate AWS ETL and AWS Lambda).
Source: visual-flow.com
6 Best Kafka Alternatives: 2022’s Must-know List
Kinesis enables streaming applications to be managed without additional infrastructure management. This highly scalable platform can process data from various sources with low latency. Known for its speed, ease of use, reliability, and capability of cross-platform replication, Amazon Kinesis is one of the most popular Kafka Alternatives. It is used for many purposes,...
Source: hevodata.com
Top 15 Kafka Alternatives Popular In 2021
Amazon Kinesis, also known as Kinesis Streams, is a popular alternative to Kafka, for collecting, processing, and analyzing video and data streams in real-time. It offers timely and insightful information, streaming data in a cost-effective manner with complete flexibility and scalability. It is easy to ingest data encompassing audios, videos, app logs, etc. It offers an...
16 Top Big Data Analytics Tools You Should Know About
Amazon Kinesis is a massively scalable, cloud-based analytics service which is designed for real-time applications.

AWS IoT Core Reviews

Open Source Internet of Things (IoT) Platforms
It is a managed cloud service. AWS IoT Core will allow devices to connect with the cloud and interact with the other devices and cloud applications. It provides support for HTTP, lightweight communication protocol, and MQTT.
14 of the Best IoT Platforms to Watch in 2021
AWS IoT Core is a behemoth in IoT platforms, and is the backbone of many fascinating projects such as Expedia, AirBnB, and CoinBase. With support for device software such as FreeRTOS and AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core encompasses a vastly superior ecosystem of products allowing development in smart homes and industrial automation. All AWS data is visualized on an AWS IoT...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon Kinesis should be more popular than AWS IoT Core. It has been mentiond 26 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Amazon Kinesis mentions (26)

  • FINTECH SCALABILITY
    Real-Time Processing — With Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB, fintech firms can analyze transactions instantly, identify fraud before it happens. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Top 7 Kafka Alternatives For Real-Time Data Processing
    Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed real-time data streaming service by AWS, designed for large-scale data ingestion and processing. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • AWS Operational issue – Multiple services in us-east-1
    Https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/ > Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a serverless streaming data service that simplifies the capture, processing, and storage of data streams at any scale. I'd never heard of that one. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Event-Driven Architecture on AWS
    Event Consumers: Services that actively listen for events and respond accordingly. These consumers can be easily implemented using microservices, AWS Lambda or Amazon Kinesis (for ingesting, processing, and analyzing streaming data in real-time). - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • AWS DEV OPS Professional Exam short notes
    When you see Amazon Kinesis as an option, this becomes the ideal option to process data in real time. Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
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AWS IoT Core mentions (9)

  • AWS AppSync Events vs IoT Core
    AWS recently announced AppSync Events and it looks like very useful service. However when I was reading about it, it just felt like this is "just" a layer on top of IoT Core which exists for many years. Let's find out if this is the case... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • WebSockets, gRPC, MQTT, and SSE - Which Real-Time Notification Method Is For You?
    MQTT - AWS IoT Core offers a managed MQTT message broker, giving you easy access to your devices. Fun fact, this is what powers the notifications in Serverlesspresso. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Serverless Facial Recognition Voting Application Using AWS Services
    AWS IoT: For real-time communication between the server and the frontend application. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Building Serverlesspresso
    AWS IoT Core is a service that allows you to connect your devices securely to the AWS cloud and with ease. Option for device management, data processing as well as integration with other AWS services is provided. Click here for more on AWS IoT Core. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Use EventBridge to handle API requests
    From here you can do all sorts of actions. For example, the serverless-coffee project used IOT Core. With IOT Core you can notify the end-user with status updates. And notify the barista that what kind of coffee needs to be created. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon Kinesis and AWS IoT Core, you can also consider the following products

Confluent - Confluent offers a real-time data platform built around Apache Kafka.

AWS IoT - Easily and securely connect devices to the cloud.

Apache Flink - Flink is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations.

Particle.io - Particle is an IoT platform enabling businesses to build, connect and manage their connected solutions.

Spark Streaming - Spark Streaming makes it easy to build scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications.

Blynk.io - We make internet of things simple