Amazon Kinesis vs. Google Cloud Dataflow

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

Based on my experience, streaming / real time / machine learning / AI type of processing and batch processing which needs less transformation are very well suited. Work load that needs complex transformation / multiple hops gets very complicated to implement. New feature like Dataflow SQL option will come in handy for sql heavy users.

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

Incentivized

• Streaming, Real time work load
• Batch processing
• Auto scaling
• flexible pricing

• 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

• inbuild template options can be expanded
• more data connector options
• easy of use

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

Google Cloud Dataproc Cloud Datafusion

• 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

• cost saving from managing our own data center for ETL servers
• consumption based pricing
• with auto scaling feature, we were able to expand components to support work load