[commandlinefan]

It makes me wonder too how many of these actually _are_ the "it's like". For example, I know that Elasticache actually is redis or memcached... makes me wonder if Kinesis isn't actually Kafka rebranded.

[hiyer]

It's not. Kinesis was around before Kafka became the de-facto tool for data streaming. AWS has a separate managed Kafka service called MSK, which came much later.

[fouc]

Kafka was made at Linkedin and then opensourced in Jan 2011, almost 3 years before AWS Kinesis (Dec 2013).

[jolux]

Pretty sure it's not Kafka. Kafka is way more complicated than Kinesis is and has a completely different API.