Sure we have. Kinesis was considered because it was inspired by Kafka, and Kafka is known to work well. The thing is that any distributed stateful service, by design, requires DevOps experience and takes time to manage. We try to stay lean at this stage, and chose Kinesis over Kafka becuase it took very little time to setup, and has no "maintenance costs". Had we have chosen Kafka, we would have enjoyed much shorter latency times.