At tiny throughput maybe? Pretty sure you could run Kafka on small ec2 instances and still get great throughput, especially if you don't need much retention. (r

At tiny throughput maybe? Pretty sure you could run Kafka on small ec2 instances and still get great throughput, especially if you don't need much retention. (reducing retention reduces need for disk I/O as consumers can't fall far behind causing disks to seek). I think for any reasonable workload, i.e 10k/s+ and/or throughput over 100mb/s Kinesis gets dumpstered for price every time.