Amazon Kinesis vs. AWS Database Migration Service

Amazon Kinesis is a great replacement for Kafka and it works better whenever the components of the solution are AWS based. Best if extended fan-out is not required, but still price-performance ratio is very good for simplifying maintenance.

I would go with a different option if the systems to be connected are legacy, for instance in the case of traditional messaging clients.

Incentivized

As stated previously, AWS Database Migration Service excels when replicating very specific data elements between environments. AWS Database Migration Service handles replication tasks to load equipment assets or customer job sites from production to QA databases very well. Full load replication - e.g., we need an exact copy of the production database in another region - works well. But when we need to load the QA database with the latest production data - it does work as well. AWS Database Migration Service comes up short because we do not want to wipe the QA database completely and make an exact copy. We want to keep what's already in the QA database and add production data so that we can QA with that level of volume. And at least with our database design, we end up having to do a lot of manual data manipulation and de-duplication.

Incentivized

• Processing huge loads of data
• Integrating well with IoT Platform on Amazon
• Integration with overall AWS Ecosystem
• Scalability

Incentivized

• Not a queue system, so little visibility into "backlog" if there is any
• Confusing terminology to make sure events aren't missed
• Sometimes didn't seem to trigger Lambda functions, or dropped events when a lot came in

Incentivized

The documentation was confusing and lacked examples. The streams suddenly stopped working with no explanation and there was no information in the logs. All these were more difficult when dealing with enhanced fan-out. In fact, we were about to abort the usage of Kinesis due to a misunderstanding with enhanced fan-out.

Incentivized

The main benefit was around set up - incredibly easy to just start using Kinesis. Kinesis is a real-time data processing platform, while Kafka is more of a message queue system. If you only need a message queue from a limited source, Kafka may do the job. More complex use cases, with low latency, higher volume of data, real time decisions and integration with multiple sources and destination at a decent price, Kinesis is better.

Incentivized

• Caused us to need to re-engineer some basic re-try logic
• Caused us to drop some content without knowing it
• Made monitoring much more difficult
• We eventually switched back to SQS because Kinesis is not the same as a Queue system

Incentivized

• Set it and forget it for maintaining data consistency - moderate cost, zero to minimal maintenance
• High touch production data loads into QA - negative ROI engineering time investment far exceeded our predictions

Incentivized