Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a fully managed service for delivering real-time streaming data to destinations such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and any custom HTTP endpoint123. It automatically scales based on the amount of data available and delivers it within seconds45.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths:

• Fully Managed: You don’t need to write applications or manage resources123.
• Real-Time: It delivers streaming data in real-time123.
• Scalability: It automatically scales based on the amount of data available45.

Weaknesses:

• Data Payload Size: The maximum size of the data payload of a record is up to 1 MB6.
• Buffering: Amazon Data Firehose buffers incoming streaming data to a certain size or for a certain period of time before delivering it2.

Integrations

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can send data records to various destinations, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and any HTTP endpoint that is owned by you or any of your third-party service providers7. It also integrates with Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka to provide a serverless, no-code solution to deliver streams from Apache Kafka clusters to Amazon S3 data lakes8. Furthermore, it integrates with AWS Lambda, allowing for additional, customized processing of the data before it is sent downstream910.

Limitations

• Quotas: Each Firehose stream has a default quota of 10 MB/sec of read throughput per partition and 10MB max record size5.
• Record Size: If Amazon Data Firehose receives a record size from Amazon MSK that is larger than 10MB, then Amazon Data Firehose delivers this record to S3 error bucket5.
• Active Partitions: When dynamic partitioning on a delivery stream is enabled, there is a default quota of 500 active partitions that can be created for that delivery stream5.

Use Cases

1. Capture Data from Non-AWS Environments: This option uses an Amazon API Gateway as a layer of abstraction, which allows you to implement custom authentication approaches for data producers, control quotas for specific producers, and change the target Kinesis stream11.
2. Backup Streaming Data to S3: This option uses Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose when you want a simple way to back up incoming streaming data with minimal administration for the processing layer and ability to send data into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), among other destinations in near real time11.
3. Real-Time Analytics: Common streaming use cases include the sharing data between different applications, streaming extract-transform-load, and real-time analytics6.