Amazon Kinesis Vs EC2

Question

Sorry for the silly question, I am new to cloud development. I am trying to develop a realtime processing app in cloud, which can process the data from a sensor in realtime. the data stream is very low data rate, <50Kbps per sensor. probably <10 sensors will be running at once.

I am confused, what is the use of Amazon Kinesis for this application. I can use EC2 directly to receive my stream and process it. Why do I need Kinesis?

Answer 1

Why do I need Kinesis?

Short answer, you don't.

Yes, you can use EC2 - and probably dozens of other technologies.

Here is the first two sentences of the Kinesis product page:

Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed service for real-time processing of streaming data at massive scale. You can configure hundreds of thousands of data producers to continuously put data into an Amazon Kinesis stream.

So, if want to manage the stack yourelf, and/or you don't need massive scale and/or you don't need the ability to scale this processing to hundreds of thousands of simulataneous producers, then Kinesis may be overkill.

On the other hand, if the ingestion of this data is mission critical, and you don't have the time, skills or ability to manage the underlying infrastructure - or there is a chance the scale of your application will grow exponentially, then maybe Kinesis is the right choice - only you can decide based on your requirements.

Answer 2

Along with what EJ Brennan Just said, there are many other ways to solve your problem as the rate of data is very low. As far as I know, amazon kinesis runs on ec2 under the hood, so may be your question is why to use kinesis as a streaming solution.

for scalability reasons ,you might need the streaming solution in future, as your volume of data grows and as the cost of maintaining the on premises resources increases and the focus shifts from application development to administration. So kinesis for that matter ,would provide pay per use model instead of you worrying about increasing/reducing your resource stack.