Amazon Kinesis is the real-time stream processing service of AWS. Whether you got video, audio, or IoT streaming data to handle, Kinesis is the way to go. Kinesis is a serverless managed service that integrates nicely with other services like Lambda or S3. Often, you will use it when SQS or SNS is too low-level. But as with all the other services on AWS, Kinesis is a professional tool that comes with its share of complications.

The simple query service (SQS) was one of the first services AWS offered. It’s a managed queuing service that lets you take pressure from your downstream services. You put your items on the queue, and other services can pull them whenever they have the capacity to work on them. It’s a managed service, so you don’t have to install or maintain the software yourself; you just configure a queue and start pushing to and pulling from it. So SQS is very simple to get started with.