Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Amazon Kinesis VS Spark Streaming

Compare Amazon Kinesis VS Spark Streaming 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.

Spark Streaming logo Spark Streaming

Spark Streaming makes it easy to build scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications.
  • Amazon Kinesis Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-28
  • Spark Streaming Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-10

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.

Spark Streaming features and specs

  • Scalability
    Spark Streaming is highly scalable and can handle large volumes of data by distributing the workload across a cluster of machines. It leverages Apache Spark's capabilities to scale out easily and efficiently.
  • Integration
    It integrates seamlessly with other components of the Spark ecosystem, such as Spark SQL, MLlib, and GraphX, allowing for comprehensive data processing pipelines.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Spark Streaming provides fault tolerance by using Spark's micro-batching approach, which allows the system to recover data in case of a failure.
  • Ease of Use
    Spark Streaming provides high-level APIs in Java, Scala, and Python, making it relatively easy to develop and deploy streaming applications quickly.
  • Unified Platform
    It provides a unified platform for both batch and streaming data processing, allowing reuse of code and resources across different types of workloads.

Possible disadvantages of Spark Streaming

  • Latency
    Spark Streaming operates on a micro-batch processing model, which introduces latency compared to real-time processing. This may not be suitable for applications requiring immediate responses.
  • Complexity
    While it integrates well with other Spark components, building complex streaming applications can still be challenging and may require expertise in distributed systems and stream processing concepts.
  • Resource Management
    Efficiently managing cluster resources and tuning the system can be difficult, especially when dealing with variable workload and ensuring optimal performance.
  • Backpressure Handling
    Handling backpressure effectively can be a challenge in Spark Streaming, requiring careful management to prevent resource saturation or data loss.
  • Limited Windowing Support
    Compared to some stream processing frameworks, Spark Streaming has more limited options for complex windowing operations, which can restrict some advanced use cases.

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

Spark Streaming videos

Spark Streaming Vs Kafka Streams || Which is The Best for Stream Processing?

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Spark Streaming Vs Structured Streaming Comparison | Big Data Hadoop Tutorial

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon Kinesis and Spark Streaming)
Stream Processing
70 70%
30% 30
Data Management
65 65%
35% 35
Big Data
62 62%
38% 38
Data Integration
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Amazon Kinesis and Spark Streaming. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

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.

Spark Streaming Reviews

We have no reviews of Spark Streaming yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon Kinesis should be more popular than Spark Streaming. 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
View more

Spark Streaming mentions (5)

  • RisingWave Turns Four: Our Journey Beyond Democratizing Stream Processing
    The last decade saw the rise of open-source frameworks like Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, and Apache Samza. These offered more flexibility but still demanded significant engineering muscle to run effectively at scale. Companies using them often needed specialized stream processing engineers just to manage internal state, tune performance, and handle the day-to-day operational challenges. The barrier to entry... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Streaming Data Alchemy: Apache Kafka Streams Meet Spring Boot
    Apache Spark Streaming: Offers micro-batch processing, suitable for high-throughput scenarios that can tolerate slightly higher latency. https://spark.apache.org/streaming/. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Choosing Between a Streaming Database and a Stream Processing Framework in Python
    Other stream processing engines (such as Flink and Spark Streaming) provide SQL interfaces too, but the key difference is a streaming database has its storage. Stream processing engines require a dedicated database to store input and output data. On the other hand, streaming databases utilize cloud-native storage to maintain materialized views and states, allowing data replication and independent storage scaling. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Machine Learning Pipelines with Spark: Introductory Guide (Part 1)
    Spark Streaming: The component for real-time data processing and analytics. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Spark for beginners - and you
    Is a big data framework and currently one of the most popular tools for big data analytics. It contains libraries for data analysis, machine learning, graph analysis and streaming live data. In general Spark is faster than Hadoop, as it does not write intermediate results to disk. It is not a data storage system. We can use Spark on top of HDFS or read data from other sources like Amazon S3. It is the designed... - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon Kinesis and Spark Streaming, you can also consider the following products

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

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

Google Cloud Dataflow - Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully-managed cloud service and programming model for batch and streaming big data processing.

PieSync - Seamless two-way sync between your CRM, marketing apps and Google in no time

Leo Platform - Leo enables teams to innovate faster by providing visibility and control for data streams.

Apache Kafka - Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.