Amazon Kinesis Firehose Destination

Amazon Kinesis Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into AWS. It can capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon Kinesis Analytics, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools and dashboards you’re already using today. It is a fully managed service that automatically scales to match the throughput of your data and requires no ongoing administration. It can also batch, compress, and encrypt the data before loading it, minimizing the amount of storage used at the destination and increasing security.

This document was last updated on February 05, 2020. If you notice any gaps, outdated information or simply want to leave some feedback to help us improve our documentation, let us know!

Getting Started

Before you start, make sure Amazon Kinesis Firehose supports the source type and connection mode you’ve chosen to implement. You can learn more about connection modes here.

1. Create at least one Kinesis Firehose delivery stream. Follow these instructions to create a new delivery stream.
2. Create an IAM policy. Sign in to the Identity and Access Management (IAM) console and follow these instructions to Create an IAM policy to allow Segment permission to write to your Kinesis Firehose Stream. Select the Create Policy from JSON option and use the following template policy in the Policy Document field. Be sure to change the {region}, {account-id} and {stream-name} with the applicable values.

{
   "Version": "2012-10-17",
   "Statement": [
       {
           "Effect": "Allow",
           "Action": [
               "firehose:PutRecord"
           ],
           "Resource": [
               "arn:aws:firehose:{region}:{account-id}:deliverystream/{stream-name}"
           ]
       }
   ]
}

1. Create an IAM role. Follow these instructions to Create an IAM role to allow Segment permission to write to your Kinesis Firehose Stream. When prompted to enter an Account ID, enter 595280932656. Make sure to enable ‘Require External ID’ and enter your Segment Source ID as the External ID*. This can be found by navigating to Settings > API Keys from your Segment source homepage. When adding permissions to your new role, find the policy you created above and attach it. Note: If you have multiple sources using Kinesis, enter one of their source IDs here for now and then follow the procedure outlined in the Multiple Sources section at the bottom of this doc once you’ve completed this step and saved your IAM role.
2. Create a new Kinesis Firehose Destination. In the Segment source that you want to connect to your Kinesis Firehose destination, click the “Add Destination” button. Search and select the Kinesis Firehose destination and enter the options: Mapped Streams, Region, and Role Address (important for the Role Address is that the role itself immediately follows “role/” e.g. arn:aws:iam::874699288871:role/example-role).

Page

If you’re not familiar with the Segment Specs, take a look to understand what the Page method does. An example call would look like:

  analytics.page();

Identify

If you’re not familiar with the Segment Specs, take a look to understand what the Identify method does. An example identify call is shown below:

analytics.identify('97980cfea0085', {
  email: 'gibbons@example.com',
  name: 'John Gibbons'
});

Track

If you’re not familiar with the Segment Specs, take a look to understand what the Track method does. An example identify call is shown below:

analytics.track("User Registered", {
  checkinDate: new Date(),
  myCoolProperty: "foobar",
});

Event Mapping

To begin using the Kinesis Firehose destination you must first decide on which Segment events you would like to route to which Firehose delivery streams. This mapping then needs to be defined in your destination settings.

Segment track events can map based on their event name. For example, if you have an event called User Registered, and you wanted these events to be published to a Firehose delivery stream called new_users, you would create a row in your destination settings that looks like this:

Any Segment event type (ie. page, track, identify, screen, etc.) can also be mapped. This allows you to publish all instances of a given Segment event type to a given stream. To do this, you simply to create a row with the event type and it’s corrensponding delivery stream:

Events can be defined insensitive to case so Page will be equivalent to page. The delivery stream name however needs to be formatted exactly as it is on AWS.

If you would like to route all events to a stream, use an * as the event name.

Data Model

Let’s say you’ve decided to publish your Segment track events named User Registered to your Kinesis Firehose delivery stream named online_registrations. If you send Segment the following track call:

{
  "userId": "user_1",
  "event": "User Registered",
  "properties": {
    "plan": "Pro Annual",
    "account_type" : "Facebook"
  }
}

The Segment Kinesis destination will issue a PutRecord request with the following parameters:

firehose.putRecord({
  Record: {
    Data: JSON.stringify(msg)) + '/n'
  },
  DeliveryStreamName: 'online_registrations'
});

Segment will append a newline character to each record to allow for easy downstream parsing.

Group

If you’re not familiar with the Segment Specs, take a look to understand what the Group method does. An example group call is shown below:

analytics.group("0e8c78ea9d9dsasahjg", {
  name: "group_name",
  employees: 3,
  plan: "enterprise",
  industry: "Technology"
});

Best Practices

Multiple Sources

If you have multiple sources using Kinesis/Firehose, you have two options:

Attach multiple sources to your IAM role

Find the IAM role you created for this destination in the AWS Console in Services > IAM > Roles. Click on the role, and navigate to the Trust Relationships tab. Click Edit trust relationship. You should see a snippet that looks something that looks like this:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::595280932656:root"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "sts:ExternalId": "YOUR_SEGMENT_SOURCE_ID"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Replace that snippet with the following, and replace the contents of the array with all of your source IDs.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::595280932656:root"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "sts:ExternalId": ["YOUR_SEGMENT_SOURCE_ID", "ANOTHER_SOURCE_ID", "A_THIRD_SOURCE_ID"]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Use a single secret ID

If you have so many sources using Kinesis that it is impractical to attach all of their IDs to your IAM role, you can set a single ID to use instead. **This approach requires that you securely store a secret value, so we recommend that you use the method above if at all possible. **

To set this value, go to the Kinesis Firehose destination settings from each of your Segment sources and set the ‘Secret ID’ to a value of your choosing. This value is a secret and should be treated as sensitively as a password. Once all of your sources have been updated to use this value, find the IAM role you created for this destination in the AWS Console in Services > IAM > Roles. Click on the role, and navigate to the Trust Relationships tab. Click Edit trust relationship. You should see a snippet that looks something that looks like this:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::595280932656:root"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "sts:ExternalId": "YOUR_SEGMENT_SOURCE_ID"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Replace your source ID (found at “YOUR_SEGMENT_SOURCE_ID”) with your secret ID.

Personas

You can send computed traits and audiences generated using Segment Personas to this destination as a user property. To learn more about Personas, contact us for a demo.

For user-property destinations, an identify call is sent to the destination for each user being added and removed. The property name is the snake_cased version of the audience name, with a true/false value to indicate membership. For example, when a user first completes an order in the last 30 days, Personas sends an Identify call with the property order_completed_last_30days: true. When the user no longer satisfies this condition (for example, it’s been more than 30 days since their last order), Personas sets that value to false.

When you first create an audience, Personas sends an Identify call for every user in that audience. Later audience syncs only send updates for users whose membership has changed since the last sync.

Settings

Segment lets you change these destination settings from the Segment app without having to touch any code.

AWS Kinesis Firehose Region

The Kinesis Firehose AWS region key

Map Segment Events to Firehose Delivery Streams

Please input the Segment event names or event types on the left and the desired Firehose delivery stream destinations on the right. This mapping is required for all events you would like in Firehose

Role Address

The address of the AWS role that will be writing to Kinesis Firehose (ex: arn:aws:iam::874699288871:role/example-role)

Secret ID

The External ID to your IAM role. This value is a secret and should be treated as a password.