Amazon Kinesis vs Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Actually we didn't select Kinesis, we were forced into using it because SQS wasn't yet supported by Lambda. Unlike Kinesis, SQS supports both FIFO and standard queues which let us control order of events processed, as well as handle retry logic, failover logic, and set up CloudWatch Alarms when we have too many events in our backlog. It also lets us know when something didn't process properly and we can alert DevOps to that issue and/or retry the processes automatically.With SQS, we have much more visibility then we ever did with Kinesis. This is very important to our use cases, as we aren't processing millions of events per second, but for us every event is very important.

We considered several messaging platforms including Kafka and Kinesis but both would have required more developer work and didn't integrate as nicely with our ecosystem. RabbitMQ is another messaging platform I've researched and prototyped on; it also would have required more developer time to implement as well but might be a good alternative for a hobbyist or a team looking for more customization.