AWS Direct Connect vs Amazon Kinesis Firehose

Amazon Kinesis Firehose vs AWS Direct Connect: What are the differences?

What is Amazon Kinesis Firehose? Simple and Scalable Data Ingestion. Amazon Kinesis Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into AWS. It can capture and automatically load streaming data into Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools and dashboards you’re already using today.

What is AWS Direct Connect? Establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.

Amazon Kinesis Firehose and AWS Direct Connect are primarily classified as "Real-time Data Processing" and "Cloud Dedicated Network Connection" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Amazon Kinesis Firehose are:

• Easy-to-Use
• Integrated with AWS Data Stores
• Automatic Elasticity

On the other hand, AWS Direct Connect provides the following key features:

• Reduces Your Bandwidth Costs – If you have bandwidth-heavy workloads that you wish to run in AWS, AWS Direct Connect reduces your network costs into and out of AWS in two ways. First, by transferring data to and from AWS directly, you can reduce your bandwidth commitment to your Internet service provider. Second, all data transferred over your dedicated connection is charged at the reduced AWS Direct Connect data transfer rate rather than Internet data transfer rates.
• Consistent Network Performance – Network latency over the Internet can vary given that the Internet is constantly changing how data gets from point A to B. With AWS Direct Connect, you choose the data that utilizes the dedicated connection and how that data is routed which can provide a more consistent network experience over Internet-based connections.
• Compatible with all AWS Services – AWS Direct Connect is a network service, and works with all AWS services that are accessible over the Internet, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).