Amazon's big data service Kinesis now available

In what could be construed as Amazon Web Services' answer to big data, the cloud giant has pushed its new Kinesis product out into full availability.

First introduced at AWS re:Invent in November, Kinesis buffers massive amounts of streaming data into a storage system with checkpoints to ingest and process these workloads in real time.

Connecting the dots, users can also move this data around within the AWS cloud between the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) and Redshift.

Users can store and process terabytes of data each hour from hundreds of thousands of sources, including (but not limited to) financial transactions, social media feeds, and location-tracked events.

Amazon asserted that Kinesis can scale to support applications and data streams of any size while also replicating across multiple availability zones.

According to AWS, not only can these business customers (and Amazon, for that matter) get useful data back instantly, but they can also write applications, generate alerts, and make other decisions virtually instantly.

AWS customers can begin accessing Kinesis via the AWS Management Console or through an API call.

Pricing is set up on a "pay-as-you" go scale, starting at $0.015 at an hourly shard rate of one megabyte per second of data.

Supported by Amazon's datacenters housed in Northern Virginia, a.k.a. the U.S. East region for the Seattle-headquartered company, inbound data transfers are free, so customers don't have to pay for transfers between the Kinesis stream and EC2-based apps. But EC2 instance charges for Amazon Kinesis processing applications do apply.