Lesson 10

Analytics Services

Kinesis, QuickSight, Athena, and Glue — streaming data, business intelligence, and serverless analytics

Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis is a family of services for collecting, processing, and analyzing real-time streaming data at scale. The module material names three components, with Data Firehose receiving the most detail.

Kinesis Data Streams

Kinesis Data Streams ingests, buffers, and processes streaming data in real time. It can continuously capture gigabytes of data per second from sources such as website clickstreams, database event streams, financial transactions, social media feeds, IT logs, and location-tracking events. The data is available within milliseconds for real-time analytics.

Kinesis Data Firehose

Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to reliably load streaming data into data stores and analytics tools. It's a fully managed service that captures, transforms, and loads streaming data into destinations like Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Splunk. You don't manage the underlying consumption, processing, or delivery infrastructure — Firehose scales automatically. Data can be batch-compressed, encrypted, and transformed before delivery.

Kinesis Video Streams

Kinesis Video Streams securely streams video from connected devices to AWS for analytics, machine learning, playback, and other processing.

Use Cases

  • Real-time dashboards: Stream metrics and logs into real-time operational dashboards.
  • Streaming ETL: Transform raw data in-flight and load into data lakes or warehouses.
  • IoT analytics: Ingest sensor data and respond in real time.
  • Video feed analytics: Process security or drone footage at scale.

Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a serverless, cloud-powered business intelligence (BI) service that makes it easy to create and publish interactive dashboards. It also includes ML-powered features — such as ML Insights — that discover hidden trends and generate forecasts without requiring machine learning expertise.

Key Features

  • Serverless: No infrastructure to manage. Scales from a few users to tens of thousands with no friction.
  • SPICE engine: QuickSight uses an in-memory calculation engine called SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) that delivers fast, interactive performance on large datasets.
  • Pay-per-session pricing: You pay only when users access dashboards, not for idle capacity. Optionally purchase per-user subscriptions for frequent authors.
  • ML Insights: Auto-generated narratives, anomaly detection, and forecasting surface insights automatically.
  • Data source breadth: Connects natively to S3, Redshift, RDS, Aurora, Athena, EMR, OpenSearch, Salesforce, and many more.
Exam Scope Note: The exam guide also lists Amazon Athena (serverless SQL queries on S3 data) and AWS Glue (serverless ETL and data catalog) under analytics services. The module TXT files do not cover these services in dedicated sections, but you may encounter them in exam questions. Athena = query data in S3 using standard SQL with no servers. Glue = extract, transform, load (ETL) service that also provides a centralized data catalog (Glue Data Catalog) used by Athena, Redshift Spectrum, and EMR.

Analytics Services Quiz

Select one answer per question. You will receive immediate feedback.

1. A company collects website clickstream data and needs to load it continuously into Amazon S3 for analysis. Which service should they use?
2. Which service enables you to run SQL queries directly on data stored in Amazon S3 without setting up any servers?
3. A company wants to create interactive dashboards with ML-powered anomaly detection for their business users. Which AWS service should they choose?
4. Which AWS analytics service provides a centralized metadata repository that Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift Spectrum can use to discover data schemas?
Progress: 0/4 correct (0%). Answer all questions to see the final recommendation.
Primary Source: AWS Academy Module 7: Storage (module-7.txt) — QuickSight and Kinesis mentions. Module 10: Auto Scaling and Monitoring (module-10.txt) — Kinesis as CloudWatch Events target. Exam Guide objectives for Athena, Glue, QuickSight, Kinesis (AWS-Certified-Cloud-Practitioner_Exam-Guide.txt).
Last updated: June, 2026© 2026 Shahriar Ahmed ShovonCredits