Kevin Sookocheff compares and contrasts Amazon’s Kinesis and SQS offerings:
Complicated Producer and Consumer Libraries
For maximum performance, Kinesis requires deploying producer and consumer libraries alongside your application. As a producer, you deploy a C++ binary with a Java interface for reading and writing data records to a Kinesis stream. As a consumer, you deploy a Java application that can communicate with other programming languages through an interface built on top of standard in and standard out. In either of these cases, adding new producers or consumers to a Kinesis stream presents some investment in development and maintenance.
Click through for the full comparison and figuring out where each fits.