Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (KDS) is a serverless data streaming service that makes it easy to capture, process, and store data streams at scale. With KDS, you can collect and process large streams of data in real time. KDS are useful for rapidly moving data off producers, continuously process the data and emitting the data to the consumer application.

There are no servers to manage with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. It is also durable, highly available and provides dedicated throughput per consumer making it a good fit for low latency applications. It enables you to continuously capture gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources, such as website click streams, database event streams, financial transactions, social media feeds, IT logs, and location-tracking events.

The following are the typical use case for using Kinesis Data Streams.

• Accelerated log and data intake
• Real-time metrics and reporting
• Real-time data analytics
• Log/event data collection
• Build event driven applications

Before you get started with integration with AWS Lambda, it is important to understand the high level architecture, key concepts and terminologies of Kinesis Data Streams.