The key benefit of using kinesis paired up it with lambda is controlled sequencing and parallelisation at the same time. Kinesis streams guarantee a single Lamb

The key benefit of using kinesis paired up it with lambda is controlled sequencing and parallelisation at the same time. Kinesis streams guarantee a single Lambda per shard iterator. For example, at MindMup, we’re using a similar setup to the one described in the article for appending events to user files. It’s critical that we don’t get two updates going over eachother in a single file, which is tricky to do with lambdas only because there’s no guarantee how many lambdas will kick off if updates come concurrently from different users for the same file. With Kinesis, we just use the file ID as the sharding key, so no more than a single lambda ever works on a single user file, but that we can have multiple lambdas in parallel working on different files.