Amazon Kinesis vs. Spotfire Streaming

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

Taking data from various sources including files, databases, web services, applying some complex rules, transforming, aggregating and producing a result. This is what Spotfire Streaming does best.
- If one needs connectivity to special services as secured databases or web services, building interactive web apps, those are probably tasks that shall be addressed with different tools.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Processing events in real-time with real low latency and high throughput.
• 100% visual program language, which can be extended by common languages like Java, Python and .NET.
• Reduced time to prototype, create an application and deployment, which reduces the software lifecycle.
• Real robust engine and server. Barely heard of customers having issues in production.

• 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

• Not all problems are suited to the event driven paradigm.
• As the complexity of an application grows, finding your way around code in the GUI takes some getting used to.
• The Spotfire Streaming development environment is built in Eclipse, which is not everyone's cup of tea.

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

Spotfire Streaming support is prompt and to the point. They help with best practices and learning from existing projects.

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

We are using Dataflow (by Google).The development time in Spotfire Streaming is definitely shorter because its GUI based. Dataflow handles late arrivals after the window closes, not sure Spotfire Streaming can do that. Dataflow can run GCP as a managed service which is why we chose that tool for our new product.

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

• While we haven't specifically integrated Spotfire Streaming into our product development, it has allowed us to see the benefits of real-time streaming data.
• We have much more visibility into how our longer term roadmap will look and what we should focus on.

Incentivized