Amazon shows how real-time data connections can benefit you

The real-time analysis of big data is a hot topic. But what does it really mean? Today, Amazon gave us a clue.

Last month, Amazon Web Services revealed its Kinesis product for quickly pushing live data into the other systems customers use. But some developers might not have been clear on what they would be able to do with it, since examples from many companies were missing.

In a press release announcing that the service is now generally available for all customers to use, Amazon included some of those missing examples.

• Digital marketing company Bizo has used Kinesis to take in data and get it ready for reporting, which “reduces our operational burden and frees up our engineers’ time to focus on building targeted advertising solutions for our clients,” the company’s vice president of engineering, Donnie Flood, is quoted as saying. Kinesis, he said, takes care of “the heavy lifting of scaling elastically in response to our growing business.”
• Kinesis also looks to be helping another digital marketing company, MediaMath. That company already processes real-time data for ad campaigns, and it’s using Kinesis as “a complementary component” of the company’s data pipeline, Eddie Fagin, MediaMath’s director of engineering, said in the release. Using Kinesis alongside other Amazon services “will minimize operational complexity,” Fagin said.
• At growing social game developer Supercell, Kinesis keeps latency low for analytics of data as players play. Kinesis “also offloads a lot of developer burden in building a real-time, streaming data ingestion platform,” Supercell services lead Sami Yliharju said in the release.

These initial use cases point to the notion that Kinesis can simplify the process of building tunnels that applications can depend on to make use of data coming in on the fly.

Big web shops such as Alibaba, Twitter, and Yahoo have figured out how to incorporate open-source technology such as Storm to inform applications in real time. Now smaller businesses paying for Amazon cloud resources can achieve similar benefits, without having to spend the time and developer resources to do all of that work.

As a result, more companies should be able to roll out real-time sites and applications, for both internal and external use.

Public clouds have been introducing more big data tools for their platforms over the past few months, and that will surely continue, too. With Amazon pointing to users getting value out of Kinesis, it’s making competitors hustle even more to either catch up or distinguish themselves with special features of their own.