Book Image

Scalable Data Streaming with Amazon Kinesis

By : Tarik Makota, Brian Maguire, Danny Gagne, Rajeev Chakrabarti
Book Image

Scalable Data Streaming with Amazon Kinesis

By: Tarik Makota, Brian Maguire, Danny Gagne, Rajeev Chakrabarti

Overview of this book

Amazon Kinesis is a collection of secure, serverless, durable, and highly available purpose-built data streaming services. This data streaming service provides APIs and client SDKs that enable you to produce and consume data at scale. Scalable Data Streaming with Amazon Kinesis begins with a quick overview of the core concepts of data streams, along with the essentials of the AWS Kinesis landscape. You'll then explore the requirements of the use case shown through the book to help you get started and cover the key pain points encountered in the data stream life cycle. As you advance, you'll get to grips with the architectural components of Kinesis, understand how they are configured to build data pipelines, and delve into the applications that connect to them for consumption and processing. You'll also build a Kinesis data pipeline from scratch and learn how to implement and apply practical solutions. Moving on, you'll learn how to configure Kinesis on a cloud platform. Finally, you’ll learn how other AWS services can be integrated into Kinesis. These services include Redshift, Dynamo Database, AWS S3, Elastic Search, and third-party applications such as Splunk. By the end of this AWS book, you’ll be able to build and deploy your own Kinesis data pipelines with Kinesis Data Streams (KDS), Kinesis Data Firehose (KFH), Kinesis Video Streams (KVS), and Kinesis Data Analytics (KDA).
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Data Streaming and Amazon Kinesis
5
Section 2: Deep Dive into Kinesis
10
Section 3: Integrations

Understanding video fundamentals

Even though KVS can handle any form of time-encoded data, its primary use case is for video and audio media. To better understand how to use KVS, we need to cover the basics of video. The two main attributes of a video are its resolution and its bitrate.

The resolution is the pixel size of the video, normally presented as horizontal x vertical – for example, 1,920 x 1,080 – and its bitrate is the amount of data that's encoded in the video per second, measured in Mbps. In general, the higher the bitrate and the higher the resolution, the higher the quality of the video.

The following diagram shows a high-level overview of how video is captured, compressed using a codec, put into a container, decompressed, and then played:

Figure 7.1 – Overview of codecs and containers

Audio and video technology is incredibly complicated, so we'll generally stay at a high level and focus on the aspects...