In order to provide analytics on streaming data in near real-time, what AWS service is most effective?

The most effective AWS service for providing analytics on streaming data in near real-time is Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. This service is specifically designed to handle streaming data and allows for the ingestion, processing, and delivery of data to various analytics services seamlessly. Kinesis Data Firehose is capable of automatically scaling to match the throughput of your data and can deliver the information to destinations like Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Elasticsearch Service, which are ideal for analysis.

This makes it an excellent choice for applications that require real-time data analytics. The ability to process data on the fly ensures that insights can be derived as soon as the data is generated, enabling businesses to respond quickly to changing conditions.

In contrast, other options mentioned do not cater specifically to streaming data requirements. While Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena can work together for querying data stored in S3, they are not optimized for real-time analytics, as there is typically a delay in data becoming available for querying. EC2 instances running processing applications require more management for scaling and maintenance, which may not be as efficient for near real-time processing. Amazon RDS, while suitable for storing and querying relational data, is not ideal for streaming data scenarios and does not support real-time ingestion or processing