Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Amazon Kinesis VS Azure Databricks

Compare Amazon Kinesis VS Azure Databricks and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Amazon Kinesis logo Amazon Kinesis

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

Azure Databricks logo Azure Databricks

Azure Databricks is a fast, easy, and collaborative Apache Spark-based big data analytics service designed for data science and data engineering.
  • Amazon Kinesis Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-28
  • Azure Databricks Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-02

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.

Azure Databricks features and specs

  • Scalability
    Azure Databricks enables easy scaling of workloads up or down, allowing users to handle large volumes of data and perform distributed processing efficiently.
  • Integration
    Seamlessly integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure SQL Data Warehouse, facilitating a streamlined data pipeline.
  • Collaboration
    Offers collaborative features like notebooks that allow multiple users to work together easily on data analytics projects.
  • Performance Optimization
    Built on top of Apache Spark, Azure Databricks provides high performance and optimized execution for data engineering and machine learning tasks.
  • Managed Service
    As a fully managed service, it handles infrastructure provisioning and maintenance, enabling users to focus on data insights rather than backend management.

Possible disadvantages of Azure Databricks

  • Cost
    Azure Databricks can be expensive, particularly for large-scale and long-running workloads, which may be a concern for budget-conscious organizations.
  • Complexity
    Despite its capabilities, Azure Databricks may have a steep learning curve, especially for users not familiar with Apache Spark.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Leveraging Azure-specific services can lead to vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate workloads and data to other cloud platforms.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    As a cloud-native service, it requires an active internet connection and might not suit scenarios that require offline processing.
  • Compliance Concerns
    Due to Azure Databricks' integration with Azure, users need to carefully manage compliance and data governance, which might be complex in multi-regional deployments.

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

Azure Databricks videos

Azure Databricks is Easier Than You Think

More videos:

  • Review - Ingest, prepare & transform using Azure Databricks & Data Factory | Azure Friday
  • Review - Azure Databricks - What's new! | DB102

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon Kinesis and Azure Databricks)
Stream Processing
100 100%
0% 0
Technical Computing
0 0%
100% 100
Data Management
100 100%
0% 0
Office & Productivity
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 Azure Databricks

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.

Azure Databricks Reviews

10 Best Big Data Analytics Tools For Reporting In 2022
Azure Databricks is a data analytics tool optimized for Microsoft’s Azure cloud services solution. It provides three development environments for data-intensive apps, namely Databricks SQL, Databricks Machine Learning, and Databricks Data Science & Engineering.The platform supports languages including Python, Java, R, Scala, and SQL, plus data science frameworks and...
Source: theqalead.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon Kinesis seems to be a lot more popular than Azure Databricks. While we know about 26 links to Amazon Kinesis, we've tracked only 2 mentions of Azure Databricks. 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
View more

Azure Databricks mentions (2)

  • Top 30 Microsoft Azure Services
    In the big data space, Azure offers Azure Databricks. This is an Apache Spark big data analytics and machine learning service over a Distributed File System. The distributed cluster of nodes running analytics and AI operations in parallel allow for fast processing of large volumes of data and integration with popular machine learning libraries such as PyTorch unleash endless possibilities for custom ML. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
  • ZooKeeper-free Kafka is out. First Demo
    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/databricks. - Source: Hacker News / about 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon Kinesis and Azure Databricks, you can also consider the following products

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

IBM Cloud Pak for Data - Move to cloud faster with IBM Cloud Paks running on Red Hat OpenShift – fully integrated, open, containerized and secure solutions certified by IBM.

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

MyAnalytics - MyAnalytics, now rebranded to Microsoft Viva Insights, is a customizable suite of tools that integrates with Office 365 to drive employee engagement and increase productivity.

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

MicroStrategy - MicroStrategy is a cloud-based platform providing business intelligence, mobile intelligence and network applications.