The Zipkin Amazon Kinesis Collector is an alternative to the Zipkin Kafka Collector. The Amazon Kinesis service is a managed message streaming service that is effective at decoupling components of cloud applications. Using it in place of Kafka removes the need to stand up and manage a distributed Kafka deployment.
The Kinesis collector is based on the Java Kinesis Client Library (KCL). This library works much the same way that Kafka does when there are multiple consumers of the same stream. In the place of zookeeper for kafka, the KCL uses DynamoDB to do its coordination.
To fully take advantage of the KinesisCollector users will send Thrift encoded Zipkin Spans directly to a Kinesis stream from each service.
While the KinesisCollector can be used directly through the provided builder interface, most users will likely find more value in the Spring Boot autoconfiguraton module. Additional information for using the module can be found here.
The permissions required for the KCL are covered in the AWS documentation here.
The message body is a list of spans. Supported encodings are the same as the POST /spans body: thrift or json.