Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics
Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics — renamed Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink on August 30, 2023 — is a service from Amazon Web Services that offers the easiest way to transform and analyze streaming data in real time by running Apache Flink applications, with Flink SQL available through Studio notebooks.
Key points
- Current name is Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink. The rename was cosmetic only: service endpoints, APIs, the AWS CLI, IAM access policies, Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, and the AWS Billing console were unaffected, and existing applications kept running unchanged.
- This is a Flink-based service, not a general SQL-over-streams service. Applications are built in Java, Python, or Scala against the Apache Flink DataStream/Table APIs; SQL is available only as embedded Flink SQL, most commonly through interactive Studio notebooks, not as a standalone SQL query interface.
- Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for SQL Applications — a separate, now-retired offering — is what let you write standard SQL queries directly against streaming data. It stopped receiving bug fixes on September 1, 2025, stopped accepting new applications on October 15, 2025, and existing applications were deleted and the service fully discontinued on January 27, 2026. Older CLF-C02 study material describing “SQL queries against streaming data” is describing this retired product, not the current Flink-based service.
- Analyzes streaming user data in real time and responds to customer queries.
- Built on Apache Flink for stream processing.
- Commonly sits between Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose in a streaming pipeline.
- Can run an Apache Flink job against an Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) cluster.