Kinesis, the streaming data service that Amazon(s amzn) Web Services announced in November, is now publicly available. The service is comparable in theory to popular open source technologies such as Apache Storm, only Kinesis brings with the fully managed experience that’s becoming par for the course within AWS.

Stream processing is becoming increasingly popular as companies — especially internet-based ones — are looking for ways to move beyond the batch-processing workloads on which they’ve been relying on for years. Really, it’s about taking advantage of the timeliness of data rather than waiting minutes or even hours to analyze along with everything else collected since the last batch process ran. Storm is probably the most-popular tool for the job, processing the data as it crosses the wire before sending someplace like Hadoop to be analyzed along with other historical data.

Twitter, which employs Storm creator Nathan Marz via its…