Kinesis is basically Kafka as a service. IIUC, Kinesis Firehose is just a way to ingest data into S3 buckets/Redshift and Firehose would give you the goodies like monitoring/fault tolerance etc.

The closest thing I could compare it to would be services that make it easier to get data into Redshift or S3. E.g. segment.io's redshift product: https://segment.com/redshift.

This looks like an AWS version of Apache Flume and Kinesis looks like an AWS version of Apache Storm. Does AWS have a Kafka equivalent i.e. a pub/sub message queue?

Kinesis != Apache Storm The easiest way to think about Kinesis is a managed queue that can remember the history for the past 24 hours.

Ah OK. I saw that it kept state so I thought it was like Storm. I don't fully understand Storm. However, Kafka can not keep state (and neither can Flume). So Kinesis is a queue that has some state?

Kinesis is a LOT more like Kafka than Storm.