Amazon Kinesis Available to Customers in North Virginia

Amazon Web Services, Inc. an Amazon.com company, announced that Amazon Kinesis, a managed service for real-time processing of high volume, streaming data, is available for use.

Using Kinesis, a customer can store and process terabytes of data an hour from hundreds of thousands of sources, making it easy to write applications that take action on real-time data such as web site click-streams, marketing and financial transactions, social media feeds, logs and metering data, and location-tracking events. Kinesis-enabled applications can power real-time dashboards, generate alerts, drive real-time business decisions such as changing pricing and advertising strategies, or send data to other big data services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EMR, or Amazon Redshift. Customers can create a stream with a few clicks in the management console or through an API call.

To date, most big data processing has been done through batch-oriented approaches such as those used by Hadoop, or through database technologies such as data warehouses. Since these systems store and process data in batches, they aren’t able to support applications that need to process streaming feeds of changing data in real time.

To build applications that rely on this ‘fast-moving’ data, many companies have developed their systems or stitched together open source tools, but these are often complex to build, difficult to operate, inelastic and hard to scale and can be unreliable or lose data. This helps solve these problems by providing a fully managed service that takes care of all the ‘heavy-lifting’ for developers, providing data ingestion and storage, high data durability and the ability to scale from kilobytes to terabytes an hour.

The client library simplifies load balancing, coordination and fault tolerance, and developers can use AWS auto scaling to create elastic, high-performance Amazon EC2 processing clusters.

It also integrates with third-party products, giving developers control and freedom to choose their preferred method of data processing, including open source products.

Customers can add real-time analytics and other functionality to their applications, turning data growth into an opportunity to build advantage and innovate for their customers.

It is available in the US East (North Virginia) region and will be rolled out to other AWS regions in the coming months.

“When we set out to build Amazon Kinesis, we wanted to eliminate the cost, effort, and expertise barriers that have prevented our customers from processing streaming data in real-time,“ said Terry Hanold, VP, cloud commerce, AWS. “We’ve gotten great feedback from our preview customers, and it’s inspiring to see the innovative ways customers are using Amazon Kinesis, across applications as diverse as gaming, mobile, advertising, manufacturing, healthcare, e-commerce, and financial services.”

Bizo, Inc. provides a B2B digital marketing platform that its clients use to reach target prospects online and shape their purchase decisions.

“Our business runs with a talented but small engineering staff; tools that save us time and reduce operational complexity allow us to focus on innovation,” said Donnie Flood, VP of engineering, Bizo. “An Amazon Kinesis-based pipeline allows us to replace our existing, batch-oriented, data ingestion and aggregation mechanism, which forms the backbone of our data pipeline and reporting infrastructure. This reduces our operational burden and frees up our engineers’ time to focus on building targeted advertising solutions for our clients while Amazon Kinesis does the heavy lifting of scaling elastically in response to our growing business.”

MediaMath, Inc. is a global digital marketing platform that is changing the advertising industry. Starting the revolution back in 2007, it built a platform that brought real-time decisioning and programmatic media buying to life.

“Our products stream billions of messages and terabytes of data daily as our clients run their digital advertising campaigns,” said Eddie Fagin, director of engineering, MediaMath. “This data is the lifeblood of our company and powers the unparalleled performance we bring to clients around the world each day. At MediaMath, we are leveraging Amazon Kinesis as a complementary component of our digital marketing platform’s data pipeline. The managed Amazon Kinesis service, SDKs, and connectors, combined with Amazon EC2 auto-scale groups, will allow us to process this massive volume of data on AWS in real time. This will minimize operational complexity, thus allowing us to focus on helping marketers connect with their customers in the most effective and efficient way.”

Finland-based Supercell Oy. is a social game developers and their two games Hay Day and Clash of Clans attract more than 8.5 million players on iOS and Android devices every day.

“Our player base has scaled at an incredible pace. Using AWS means we can rely on AWS tools in managing our infrastructure to match our growth,” said Sami Yliharju, services lead, Supercell. “We are using Amazon Kinesis for real-time delivery of game insight data sent by hundreds of our game engine servers. Amazon Kinesis enables our business-critical analytics and dashboard applications to reliably get the data streams they need, without delays. Amazon Kinesis also offloads a lot of developer burden in building a real-time, streaming data ingestion platform, and enables Supercell to focus on delivering games that delight players worldwide.”

“Customers are generating massive amounts of data from sensors, mobile devices, infrastructure log servers, and other machine data from a variety of sources and data integration is playing a more important role than ever,” said Marge Breya, EVP and CMO, Informatica Corporation “Informatica Vibe technology, the industry’s first and only embeddable virtual data machine, is designed to embed data integration into the next generation of applications, which is key for customers to harness the power of all their data. Informatica and AWS are working together to leverage Amazon Kinesis so customers can simplify big data collection from all these sources using the Vibe Data Stream for Machine Data product, and deliver data directly to Amazon Kinesis for real-time stream processing on AWS.“