Jen Underwood describes Amazon Kinesis:
Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed service for real-time processing of streaming data at massive scale. Amazon Kinesis is ideal for Internet of Things (IoT) use cases. It can collect and process hundreds of terabytes of data per hour from hundreds of thousands of sources, allowing you to easily write applications that process information in real-time, from sources such as web site click-streams, Raspberry Pi gadgets, devices, social media, operational logs, metering data and more.
With Amazon Kinesis, you can build real-time dashboards, capture exceptions, execute algorithms, and generate alerts. With point-and-click menus, you can ingest data, query it and then send output to a variety of destinations including but not limited to Amazon S3, Amazon EMR, Amazon DynamoDB, or Amazon Redshift.
Kinesis is powerful, especially if you’re already locked into the AWS platform. My preference is Apache Kafka, but Kinesis is definitely worth learning about.