AWS Kinesis helps you move from batch to real-time. In this post, I’ll walk through how Kinesis works, the key concepts you really need to know, and a couple of real-world architectures using Kinesis for logs and IoT-style data.

I. Why real-time streaming matters

For many years, we were happy with batch:

• Every hour: export logs, run a cron job, push to S3
• Every night: run a big ETL job, load to a data warehouse
• Product teams wait until “tomorrow” for reports

Today, that’s often not enough: