| The per-message cost of AWS Kinesis is extremely tiny. If your company's recent article, Scaling NSQ to 750 Billion Messages, is an accurate count of messages you'd put through Kinesis, that would cost around $11,000 over the entire lifetime of the system in per-message fees by my calculations. That seems like a rather trivial cost. If you expand this analysis to include the per-shard costs, assuming perfect and constant utilization over a four year period, delivering 750 billion messages would require (assuming 1kb messages) an average of 6 active shards at $11.25 per shard-month. You can scale these up and down dynamically, so real-world efficiency doesn't have to be wildly different. If I were to complain about Kinesis, cost would not be my complaint. The limit of 5 reads per second per shard creates a hard floor on latency. Kafka can definitely beat that! From an outsider's perspective, I would not dismiss Kinesis so quickly on cost alone. Lock-in and the product's actual limits seem like bigger problems. EDIT: As an aside, don't forget to add the inter-AZ bandwidth cost into your Kafka equation if you want a true apples-to-apples comparison because Kinesis writes the messages to three availability zones. |