Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform announced on Thursday the launch of Kinesis Analytics, a new service that makes it easier to analyze real-time streaming data with the help of standard SQL queries.
Amazon Kinesis simplifies the process of working with real-time streaming data in the AWS Cloud. It allows users to create a Kinesis Stream or Kinesis Firehose, arrange to pump data in to it, and then build an application to process or analyze it, instead of setting up and running their own processing and short-term storage infrastructure.
Users can run continuous SQL queries against their streaming data, filtering, transforming, and summarizing the data as it arrives.
The main selling point is the ability to “build a powerful, end-to-end stream processing pipeline in 5 minutes without having to write anything more complex than a SQL query.”
Kinesis Analytics will analyze a sample of the incoming records and then propose a suitable schema. You can use it as-is, or you can fine-tune it to better reflect your actual data model. Once the schema has been defined, you can use the built-in SQL editor (complete with syntax checking and easy testing against live data).
You can configure Kinesis Analytics to route the results of the query to up to four destinations including Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, or an Amazon Kinesis Stream.
Kinesis Analytics is available in Amazon’s EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions.
