Amazon Web Services Announces Amazon Kinesis

Streaming data service brings real-time decision-making to Big Data

Limited preview starting today

AWS re:Invent 2013

SEATTLE--()--Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced Amazon Kinesis, a fully managed service for real-time processing of high-volume, streaming data. Using Amazon Kinesis, a customer can store and process terabytes of data an hour from hundreds of thousands of sources, making it easy to write applications that take action on real-time data such as web site click-streams, marketing and financial transactions, social media feeds, logs and metering data and location-tracking events. Amazon Kinesis-enabled applications can power real-time dashboards, generate alerts, drive real-time business decisions such as changing pricing and advertising strategies or send data to other big data services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (Amazon EMR) or Amazon Redshift. Amazon Kinesis scales elastically to support applications that process data streams of nearly any size, while replicating all data across multiple Availability Zones to help ensure high durability and availability. To learn more about Amazon Kinesis, visit http://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/.

To date, most big data processing has been done through batch-oriented approaches such as those used by Hadoop, or through database technologies such as data warehouses. Since these systems store and process data in batches, they aren’t able to support applications that need to process streaming feeds of rapidly changing data in real time. To build applications that rely on this “fast-moving” data, many companies have developed their own systems or stitched together open source tools, but these are often complex to build, difficult to operate, inelastic and hard to scale and can be unreliable or lose data. Amazon Kinesis helps solve these problems by providing a fully managed service that takes care of all the “heavy-lifting” for developers, providing easy data ingestion and storage, high data durability and the ability to scale seamlessly from kilobytes to terabytes an hour – at a fraction of the cost and effort. The Amazon Kinesis client library simplifies load balancing, coordination and fault tolerance, and developers can use AWS Auto Scaling to easily create elastic, high-performance Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) processing clusters. Amazon Kinesis also integrates with third-party products, giving developers control and freedom to choose their preferred method of data processing, including popular open source products. With Amazon Kinesis, customers can quickly and easily add real-time analytics and other functionality to their applications, turning today’s explosive data growth into an opportunity to build competitive advantage and innovate for their customers.

“Database and MapReduce technologies are good at handling large volumes of data,” said Terry Hanold, Vice President of New Business Initiatives, AWS. “But they are fundamentally batch-based, and struggle with enabling real-time decisions on a never-ending—and never fully complete—stream of data. Amazon Kinesis aims to fill this gap, removing many of the cost, effort and expertise barriers customers encounter with streaming data solutions, while providing the performance, durability and scale required for the largest, most advanced implementations.”

With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, or through a simple API call, customers can create a data “stream” that reliably captures and stores data as it is submitted, making it available to applications, open source streaming tools, and data stores (e.g. Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon Redshift). For example, a customer could use Amazon Kinesis to build an application that extracts key metrics from log data before sending it to the Amazon Redshift data warehouse service. Increasing or decreasing the size of a stream makes new capacity available in seconds, and customers pay only for the size of their data stream.

The NASDAQ OMX Group is the world’s largest exchange company, owning and operating 24 markets across six continents, including The NASDAQ Stock Market. “Exchange order data peaks at tens to hundreds of megabytes per second, and we have to accurately record and process every single transaction,” said Ann Neidenbach, Senior Vice President of Global Software Development, NASDAQ OMX. “Amazon Kinesis is designed to handle market order data in real-time, durably and reliably, without data loss, enabling continuous analysis and auditing of this stream of market data. This lets us focus on building the next generation of innovative financial tools and services.”

To learn more and sign up for the limited preview of Amazon Kinesis, visit http://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/limited-preview/.

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services, Inc. began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. Amazon Web Services offers over 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle Paperwhite is the world’s best-selling and most advanced e-reader. It features new display technology with higher contrast, the next generation built-in light, a faster processor, the latest touch technology, and exclusive new features designed from the ground up for readers. Kindle, the lightest and smallest Kindle, features improved fonts and faster page turns. The new Kindle Fire HDX features a stunning exclusive 7” or 8.9” HDX display, a quad-core 2.2 GHz processor, 2x more memory, and 11 hours of battery life, as well as exclusive new features of Fire OS 3.0 including X-Ray for Music, Second Screen, Prime Instant Video downloads, and the revolutionary new Mayday button. The all-new Kindle Fire HD includes an HD display, high-performance processor and dual speakers at a breakthrough price.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, www.amazon.es, www.amazon.com.br, www.amazon.in, www.amazon.com.mx, and www.amazon.com.au. As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment and data center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Contacts

Amazon.com, Inc.
Media Hotline, 206-266-7180
www.amazon.com/pr

Release Summary

Amazon Web Services announced Amazon Kinesis, a fully managed service for real-time processing of high-volume, streaming data.

Contacts

Amazon.com, Inc.
Media Hotline, 206-266-7180
www.amazon.com/pr