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Media Service: Kinesis

Explore how AWS Kinesis functions as a highly durable, ordered streaming service supporting multiple consumers simultaneously. Understand its key differences from SQS, its cost benefits, and the operational setup involving shards. This lesson helps you grasp when and why to use Kinesis for real-time data streaming in AWS environments.

A linked list in the cloud

You can think of a Kinesis stream as a highly-durable linked list in the cloud. The use cases for Kinesis are often similar to those of SQS—you would typically use either Kinesis or SQS when you want to enqueue records for asynchronous processing.

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Kinesis vs SQS

The main difference between the two services is:

  • SQS can only have one consumer, while Kinesis can have many.
  • Once an SQS message gets consumed, it gets deleted from the queue. But Kinesis records get added to a list in a stable order, and any number of consumers can read a copy of the stream by keeping a cursor over this never-ending list.
  • Multiple
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