Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced the availability of Amazon Kinesis Analytics, a fully managed service for continuously querying streaming data using standard SQL. The company claims that using Kinesis Analytics, developers can write standard SQL queries on streaming data and gain actionable insights in real-time, without having to learn any new programming skills.
AWS say that today’s digital businesses generate massive quantities of streaming data from diverse sources such as website and mobile app click-streams, sensors embedded in connected devices, and IT system log files. Being able to continuously query and gain insights from this information in real-time – as it arrives – can allow companies to respond more quickly to business and customer needs.
However, existing data processing and analytics solutions aren’t able to continuously process this “fast moving” data, so customers have had to develop streaming data processing applications – which can take months to build and fine-tune – and invest in infrastructure to handle high-speed, high-volume data streams that might include tens of millions of events per hour.
Now, with Kinesis Analytics, AWS say that continuously querying streaming data in real-time is as simple as writing SQL queries. Kinesis Analytics integrates with Kinesis Streams and Kinesis Firehose and can automatically recognize standard data formats within data streams and suggest a schema, which is easy to edit using Kinesis Analytics’ interactive schema editor. Kinesis Analytics automatically provisions, deploys, and scales the resources required to continuously run queries, delivering processed results directly to AWS services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service.
Roger Barga, General Manager at Amazon Kinesis commented :
AWS’s functionality (…) allows our customers to readily extract and deploy insights from the significant amount of data they’re storing in AWS. With the addition of Amazon Kinesis Analytics, we’ve expanded what’s already the broadest portfolio of analytics services available and made it easy to use SQL to do analytics on real-time streaming data so that customers can deliver actionable insights to their business faster than ever before.