Amazon Kinesis vs Locust: What are the differences?

Developers describe Amazon Kinesis as "Store and process terabytes of data each hour from hundreds of thousands of sources". Amazon Kinesis can collect and process hundreds of gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources, allowing you to easily write applications that process information in real-time, from sources such as web site click-streams, marketing and financial information, manufacturing instrumentation and social media, and operational logs and metering data. On the other hand, Locust is detailed as "Define user behaviour with Python code, and swarm your system with millions of simultaneous users". Locust is an easy-to-use, distributed, user load testing tool. Intended for load testing web sites (or other systems) and figuring out how many concurrent users a system can handle.

Amazon Kinesis can be classified as a tool in the "Real-time Data Processing" category, while Locust is grouped under "Load and Performance Testing".

Some of the features offered by Amazon Kinesis are:

• Real-time Processing- Amazon Kinesis enables you to collect and analyze information in real-time, allowing you to answer questions about the current state of your data, from inventory levels to stock trade frequencies, rather than having to wait for an out-of-date report
• Easy to use- You can create a new stream, set the throughput requirements, and start streaming data quickly and easily. Amazon Kinesis automatically provisions and manages the storage required to reliably and durably collect your data stream
• High throughput. Elastic.- Amazon Kinesis seamlessly scales to match the data throughput rate and volume of your data, from megabytes to terabytes per hour. Amazon Kinesis will scale up or down based on your needs

On the other hand, Locust provides the following key features:

• Define user behaviour in code
• Distributed & scalable
• Proven & battle tested

"Scalable" is the top reason why over 5 developers like Amazon Kinesis, while over 7 developers mention "Supports distributed" as the leading cause for choosing Locust.

Locust is an open source tool with 15.9K GitHub stars and 2.11K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Locust's open source repository on GitHub.

Amazon, Instacart, and Lyft are some of the popular companies that use Amazon Kinesis, whereas Locust is used by Craftbase, Samba Tech, and Doubtnut. Amazon Kinesis has a broader approval, being mentioned in 252 company stacks & 322 developers stacks; compared to Locust, which is listed in 23 company stacks and 87 developer stacks.