Amazon Kinesis Data Streams vs Lightstreamer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a cloud, serverless service for capturing, processing, and analyzing live data streams. It can continuously capture gigabytes per second from hundreds of thousands of sources, then make records available to multiple real-time analytics applications, Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, or AWS Lambda within 70 milliseconds of collection. Data is synchronously replicated across three Availability Zones in an AWS Region. Each stream supports up to 20 consumers with dedicated read throughput, and retention can be configured for as long as 365 days. Server-side encryption uses AWS Key Management Service keys, while Amazon VPC provides private access. Integrations include DynamoDB, Aurora, Database Migration Service, CloudWatch, Lambda, Managed Service for Apache Flink, and Kinesis Data Firehose. Records can be delivered to Amazon S3 Tables as Apache Iceberg tables or to S3 buckets in source format. It supports log and event streaming, real-time analytics, event-driven applications, and real-time AI or machine-learning workloads. Access is through an API or web interface. Pricing is paid from $0.03, with no free plan or AWS Free Tier availability.

Lightstreamer is an event broker for delivering real-time data to web and mobile applications, including across proxies, firewalls, disconnections, and network congestion. Intelligent Streaming adjusts data flow to network conditions and can resample or combine updates to keep users synchronized. Messaging options include publish/subscribe, request/response, client-to-server messaging, and fine-grained item and field subscriptions. StreamSense chooses WebSockets or HTTP connections for each client, including through restrictive firewalls and legacy proxies.

Ready-made connectors cover Kafka, MQTT, and JMS, with named examples including Confluent Cloud, Amazon MSK, Redpanda, AWS IoT Core, IBM MQ, and ActiveMQ. Custom adapters can be built with Java, Python, Node.js, .NET, and TCP sockets. Lightstreamer supports TLS, certificates, mutual authentication, and custom authentication and authorization. It can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, with Helm, Docker, and Kubernetes support. Monitoring options include a web dashboard, configurable logs, JMX, Prometheus, and Grafana integrations. The free Non-Production Limited License requires a Production License and a server restart after at most 210 minutes of uptime.