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hakann

Is AWS SNS/SQS equivalent to Kafka? And what are the differences, advantages/disadvantages of either one?

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Kinesis is the AWS alternative to Kafka, minus some features.

Kinesis is for streaming computations. It's closer to Apache Storm (which typically uses Kafka) than Kafka.

You might be thinking of Simple Workflow Service, which is closer to Storm. Grandparent had it right.

Agree with Cieplak. Kinesis is very Kafka-esque, with less flexibility (which makes sense for a managed service).

Producer/Consumer semantics are pretty similar. Partitions in Kafka are Shards in Kinesis terminology.

One big difference is retention period in Kinesis has a hard limit of 24 hours (no way to request increase on this limit).

Kinesis IMO is easier to use being a managed service. I have performed a Kafka to Kinesis migration & have found Kinesis easier to use. Plus, AWS Lambda makes consuming Kinesis a breeze (if your usecase suits it).

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