Hello and welcome to Fundamentals of Streaming Data with Amazon Kinesis.  

My name is Stephen Cole and I’ll be your instructor for this course.  I’ve been working in the cloud for several years and currently hold many active AWS certifications.

My contact information is shown on the screen.  Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions, comments, or concerns.  

Alternatively, you can always get in touch with us here at Cloud Academy by sending an email to support@cloudacademy.com and one of our cloud experts will follow up with you.

This course is intended for people that want to learn about streaming data, why it's important, and how   Kinesis can be used to send data into AWS.

It assumes no prior knowledge of Amazon Kinesis, streaming data, or its internals.

At times, the language will get a little technical but, as I introduce new terminology, I will explain what it is and how it works.

I have three primary goals for this course.

I want to introduce you to what data streaming is, what problems it solves, and, at a high level, how Amazon Kinesis addresses them.

This course was born out of a need to define the vocabulary around data streaming.  As I was building the outlines for courses and lectures about Kinesis Video Streams, Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, and Kinesis Data Analytics, I found myself repeating some of the fundamental concepts of streaming and the language involved.

This is a foundational-level course.  Additional courses on Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Data Firehose, Data Analytics, and Video Streams, will start based on concepts covered here.

It is important to have a solid foundation for learning about data streaming that will help you learn about how to use Amazon Kinesis and, to an extent, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka.

When you're finished with this course, you will know what data streaming is, why it has value, some of the vocabulary of data streaming, and use cases for streaming data.  I will also cover, at a very high level, what services exist inside Amazon Kinesis.  These services are Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, Kinesis Data Analytics, and Kinesis Video Streams.

I will also explain that, while Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, and Kinesis Video streams all process streaming data, they are individual services that solve unique problems.  

I cannot overstate the importance of understanding that the Kinesis services are different.  This is especially true of Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Firehose.  It is a mistake to simply think that Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Firehose do exactly the same thing with the difference being that Firehose is fully managed by AWS.  

With that said, let's get started!