hands-on lab

Sessionizing Clickstream Data with Amazon Kinesis and Managed Apache Flink

Difficulty: Beginner
Duration: Up to 1 hour and 30 minutes
Students: 3,521
Rating: 4.6/5
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Description

Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink is a fully managed service that enables you to perform analysis using SQL and other tools on streaming data in real time. Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink scales automatically to match your usage, there's no infrastructure to manage and you only pay for what you use.

Use cases for Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink include:

  • Streaming extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs
  • Real-time log analysis
  • Ad-tech and digital marketing analysis

Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink allows you to make use of existing and familiar SQL skills, it also integrates with other AWS services. You can deliver your results to any destination supported by Kinesis Data Streams or Kinesis Firehose, and use a Lambda function to deliver to external or unmanaged destinations.

In this lab, you will learn how to use Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink to sessionize sample clickstream data and output it to DynamoDB using an AWS Lambda function.

Learning Objectives

This is a beginner-level lab, upon completion, you will be able to:

  • Use Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink to analyze clickstream data
  • Create an AWS Lambda function that adds records to an Amazon DynamoDB table
  • Configure Amazon Kinesis to send results to your AWS Lambda function

Intended Audience

  • Candidates for the AWS Certified Data Analytics Speciality exam
  • Data Engineers
  • Cloud Engineers

Prerequisites

Familiarity with Data Analytics, SQL, the Bash shell, and the Python programming language will be beneficial but is not required.

The following courses can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

Updates

August 31st, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

July 17th, 2023 - Updated the lab to use Zeppelin and Apache Flink

March 12th, 2023 - Resolved an issue that caused the lab to fail to set up on rare occasions

October 14th, 2022 - Updated instructions due to updates in the Kinesis Data Stream data retention timeframes

September 8th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to the reflect UI

May 31st, 2022 - Updated screenshots & instructions to reflect UI

December 8th, 2021 - Updated lab step instructions to correct grammar error

December 6th, 2021 - Updated lab step instructions to reflect latest user interface changes

September 7th, 2021 - Updated lab step instructions to reflect latest user interface changes 

March 11th, 2021 - Updated AWS Lambda lab step to reflect latest user interface changes

January 22nd, 2021 - Updated AWS Lambda lab step to reflect latest user interface changes

Environment before

Environment after

Covered topics

Lab steps

Logging In to the Amazon Web Services Console
Starting a Managed Apache Flink Studio Notebook Application
Connecting to the Virtual Machine using EC2 Instance Connect
Simulating a Real-Time Clickstream
Sessionizing the Clickstream Data using Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink
Storing Sessions in an Amazon DynamoDB Table with AWS Lambda