Well, you can get hosted Kafka as a service as well. My company Aiven offers one such service in AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean and UpCloud (https://aiven.io/kafka). CloudKarafka is an another vendor with managed offering and Heroku too just launched Kafka service as well.
I think Kinesis is an excellent service, but if you have an existing stack or preference on OpenSource solutions, it's good to have choice.
I think Kinesis is an excellent service, but if you have an existing stack or preference on OpenSource solutions, it's good to have choice.