Sorry for the silly question, I am new to cloud development. I am trying to develop a realtime processing app in cloud, which can process the data from a sensor in realtime. the data stream is very low data rate, <50Kbps per sensor. probably <10 sensors will be running at once.
I am confused, what is the use of Amazon Kinesis for this application. I can use EC2 directly to receive my stream and process it. Why do I need Kinesis?
Short answer, you don't.
Yes, you can use EC2 - and probably dozens of other technologies.
Here is the first two sentences of the Kinesis product page:
So, if want to manage the stack yourelf, and/or you don't need massive scale and/or you don't need the ability to scale this processing to hundreds of thousands of simulataneous producers, then Kinesis may be overkill.
On the other hand, if the ingestion of this data is mission critical, and you don't have the time, skills or ability to manage the underlying infrastructure - or there is a chance the scale of your application will grow exponentially, then maybe Kinesis is the right choice - only you can decide based on your requirements.