The final piece of streaming ingestion is Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka). If Kinesis is AWS's proprietary streaming service, Kafka is the industry-standard open-source streaming platform, and MSK is AWS offering Kafka as a managed service.
The key question mirrors yesterday's: "We have Kinesis, so why MSK? When do we use what?" Today we understand Kafka's fundamentals (topics, partitions, consumer groups) and see exactly where they diverge from Kinesis. The exam almost always compares these two.
In Kafka, data is organized into topics — think of them as "subject-based logs" (e.g., orders, clicks, sensor-data)