Event streaming · Amazon Web Services

Amazon Kinesis

AWS's managed service for real-time data streaming, ingesting and processing continuous data at scale without managing servers.

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Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is AWS's native real-time streaming service, letting producers write records that consumers (Lambda functions, KCL applications, or downstream services) read with millisecond-level latency. It offers two capacity models: On-Demand, where AWS manages scaling automatically and bills per GB of data written/read, and Provisioned, where throughput is bought in advance as shards billed hourly. Retention can extend up to 365 days for replay scenarios, and Enhanced Fan-Out lets multiple consumers read the full stream in parallel without contending for shared throughput. As a fully managed AWS-native service it integrates tightly with Lambda, Firehose and other AWS analytics tools but lacks the open protocol compatibility of Kafka, meaning migrating off it typically requires re-architecting consumers.

At a glance

Vendor Amazon Web Services
Pricing model Usage-based
Free tier No
Deployment Cloud
Open source No
Best for AWS-native teams needing managed real-time streaming without operating Kafka infrastructure.

Pricing

On-Demand mode bills per GB written and read plus a per-stream hourly charge; Provisioned mode bills per shard-hour. No free tier is offered.

Plan Price Notes
On-Demand Standard $0.08/GB data-in, $0.040/GB data-out (US East example) Plus per-stream hourly charge; rates vary by region
Provisioned $0.015 per shard-hour (example rate) Customer buys shard capacity in advance; PUT payload units billed per million 25KB chunks

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features

  • On-Demand and Provisioned capacity modes
  • Millisecond-latency record ingestion
  • Up to 365-day data retention
  • Enhanced Fan-Out for parallel consumers
  • Native Lambda and Firehose integration
  • Streaming to Apache Iceberg tables

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Alternatives

Apache Kafka Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput publish-subscribe messaging and durable event logs. Confluent Fully managed Kafka service from Kafka's original creators, adding schema registry, connectors and stream processing on top. Google Cloud Pub/Sub Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless messaging service for asynchronous event ingestion between applications and analytics pipelines.

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Terms to know

Event tracking Capturing specific user actions, such as clicks or purchases, as discrete, named pieces of data. Data pipeline The automated sequence of steps that moves data from source systems to a destination, transforming it along the way. Apache Iceberg An open table format adding ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel to files stored in a data lake. Event streaming Continuously publishing and consuming records of things that happened, in order, through a durable, replayable log.

Related guides

How to choose an event streaming platform Kafka's protocol won the ecosystem; the real decision is who operates the cluster and whether you need Kafka compatibility at all.