Everyone is getting into the big data analytics business, and Amazon Web Services is no exception. The company has just announced a public beta trial for Kinesis, the data streaming analytics platform it announced at AWS Re:Invent. The service allows developers to pull data from a wide variety of sources as needed. The company promotes Kinesis as an alternative to Hadoop, and other observers say it’s similar to Storm.
However, blogger G. Gordon Worley III cautions that while the tool generally performs as advertised, it does have some drawbacks. “The downside, though, is that every Kinesis application consists of just one procedure, so you can’t do complex stream processing like can be done with Storm unless you connect together multiple Kinesis applications,” he writes.