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With so much overlap in the functionality and use cases of Kafka and Kinesis, it's not clear why they increase their surface area by using both.

Is Kinesis' write latency better than it was? IIRC it wrote to 3 data centers synchronously, which led to some pretty bad performance. This was almost 2 years ago though.

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Kinesis works better for people that have opt'ed in for the whole AWS toolbox, esp. when you do not want to maintain your own Kafka cluster on ec2. Unfortunately, I cannot say anything about the write latency, because I have no in-depth knowledge about the inner workings and what is "fast enough" for them.

Exactly. The biggest motivation to use Kinesis was the other services we could plug in from 'AWS ecosystem'. Lambdas have Kinesis triggers available natively. We did not have any concern with the latency of Kinesis. Now I'm curious, do you have any literature on the bad performance history?

Just past experience. In the end, the low data retention time was the real reason Kinesis didn't fit our needs, but the difference in write performance between the two was pretty stark. Read performance was fine for what we needed.

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