My colleague Adi Krishnan wrote the following guest post to tell you about the newest addition to the Amazon Kinesis API.

— Jeff;

Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed service for real-time processing of streaming data at massive scale. Customers love the fact that they can put any amount of data in to a Kinesis stream and then use it to power real-time dashboards and generate alerts, or route it to big data services such as S3 and Amazon Redshift.

Today, the Amazon Kinesis team is excited to release a new API function, PutRecords , so that you can put data into your Kinesis stream with greater efficiency and less complexity. You can use the new PutRecords function to send up to 500 records to your Kinesis stream in a single HTTP call. Each record in the call can be as large as 50 KB, up to a limit of 4.5 MB for the entire request.

Since we launched last November, customers have used Amazon Kinesis to put data from many different sources, commonly called producers. A producer could be an application server running on EC2, a web browser, or a mobile application. The common theme across these producers is that developers want to get data off of them and into their Kinesis stream as quickly and efficiently as possible.

You can use PutRecords to easily build high-throughput producers that run on EC2 instances. Many customers use multi-threading or local batching to improve the throughput of these producers. PutRecords reduces this complexity by improving the amount of throughput that you can achieve by using a single HTTP call.

For mobile applications, you can use PutRecords to make your application more robust in the face of intermittent network connections and limited battery life. PutRecords reduces the overhead associated with multiple HTTP calls, allowing you to send up to 5 MB of usage and application logs in a single call.

You can learn more about the new operation in the Kinesis Developer Guide and the Kinesis API Reference. We recommend starting out by using one of the AWS SDKs that support the new feature.

— Adi Krishnan (Senior Product Manager) & Ryan Nienhuis (Technical Program Manager)