AWS extension overview
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that offers a wide variety of services such as distributed computing, database storage, content delivery, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) integration services for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).
The AWS event forwarding extension leverages Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to send events from the Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network to AWS for further processing. This guide covers how to install the extension and employ its capabilities in an event forwarding rule.
Prerequisites
You must have an AWS account with an existing Kinesis data stream in order to use this extension. If you do not have a pre-existing data stream, see the AWS documentation on creating a new data stream using the AWS Management Console.
Install the extension install
To install the AWS extension, navigate to the Data Collection UI or Experience Platform UI and select Event Forwarding from the left navigation. From here, select a property to add the extension to, or create a new property instead.
Once you have selected or created the desired property, select Extensions in the left navigation, then select the Catalog tab. Search for the AWS card, then select Install.
On the next screen, you must provide the connection credentials for your AWS account. Specifically, you must provide your AWS access key ID and secret access key. If you do not know these values, see the AWS documentation on how to obtain your access key ID and secret access key.
When finished, select Save and the extension is installed.
Configure an event forwarding rule rule
After installing the extension, create a new event forwarding rule and configure its conditions as desired. When configuring the actions for the rule, select the AWS extension, then select Send Data to Kinesis Data Stream for the action type.
The right panel updates to show configuration options for how the data should be sent. Specifically, you must assign data elements to the various properties that represent your Event Hub configuration.
Kinesis Data Stream Details
Kinesis Data Streams segregates the data records belonging to a stream into multiple shards. It uses the partition key that is sent with each data record to determine which shard a given data record belongs to.
A good partition key for distributing customers might be the customer number, since it is different for each customer. A poor partition key might their zip code because they all may live in the same area nearby. In general, you should choose a partition key that has the highest range of different potential values. See the AWS article on scaling your Kinesis data streams for best practices on managing partition keys.
Data
Under the Raw option, you can paste the JSON object directly into the provided text field, or you can select the data element icon (
You can also use the JSON Key-Value Pairs Editor option to manually add each key-value pair through a UI editor. Each value can be represented by a raw input, or a data element can be selected instead.
When finished, select Keep Changes to add the action to the rule configuration. When you are satisfied with the rule, select Save to Library.
Finally, publish a new event forwarding build to enable the changes to the library.
Next steps
This guide covered how to send data to Kinesis Data Streams using the AWS event forwarding extension. For more information on event forwarding capabilities in Experience Platform, refer to the event forwarding overview.