[hakann]

Is AWS SNS/SQS equivalent to Kafka? And what are the differences, advantages/disadvantages of either one?

[Cieplak]

Kinesis is the AWS alternative to Kafka, minus some features.

[power]

Kinesis is for streaming computations. It's closer to Apache Storm (which typically uses Kafka) than Kafka.

[serialpreneur]

Agree with Cieplak. Kinesis is very Kafka-esque, with less flexibility (which makes sense for a managed service).

Producer/Consumer semantics are pretty similar. Partitions in Kafka are Shards in Kinesis terminology.

One big difference is retention period in Kinesis has a hard limit of 24 hours (no way to request increase on this limit).

Kinesis IMO is easier to use being a managed service. I have performed a Kafka to Kinesis migration & have found Kinesis easier to use. Plus, AWS Lambda makes consuming Kinesis a breeze (if your usecase suits it).