[htn]

Well, you can get hosted Kafka as a service as well. My company Aiven offers one such service in AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean and UpCloud (https://aiven.io/kafka). CloudKarafka is an another vendor with managed offering and Heroku too just launched Kafka service as well.

I think Kinesis is an excellent service, but if you have an existing stack or preference on OpenSource solutions, it's good to have choice.

[anilgulecha]

Hosted Kafka by a third party is not equivalent to (potential) Hosted Kafka by AWS.

There's a lot of signalling/data at the back when AWS implements it, which you will never have access to.