What is the primary use of Amazon Kinesis?

The primary use of Amazon Kinesis is real-time data streaming and analysis. Kinesis is designed for ingesting and processing large streams of data records in real time. It enables developers to build applications that can continuously ingest and process data from various sources, such as IoT devices, website clickstreams, and social media feeds.

With Kinesis, users can collect, process, and analyze data with minimal latency, which is especially important for use cases like real-time analytics, monitoring, and event-driven applications. The service provides tools like Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, and Kinesis Data Analytics, which allow for flexible data handling, enabling businesses to derive insights quickly as data flows in, rather than having to wait for batch processing.

Other options like long-term data storage, backup and disaster recovery, and file storage and retrieval are better suited to services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier, which focus on storing data for extended periods or ensuring data durability rather than on real-time processing capabilities.