# Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

> AWS-native shard-based streaming with on-demand capacity

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is AWS's managed event streaming service, organising data into shards with provisioned or on-demand capacity and integrating directly with the rest of the AWS analytics stack.

Website: https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-streams/

## Use it when

- Your stack is already on AWS and you want durable streaming with IAM, Lambda, Firehose, and Managed Flink wired in natively.
- You want capacity to be a billing decision, not an operational one: on-demand mode splits shards automatically as traffic grows.
- Multiple applications need to replay the same stream independently, with retention configurable from 24 hours to 365 days.
- Nobody on the team wants to run brokers; AWS runs everything and shards are the only knob.

## Think twice when

- You want the Kafka protocol or its tooling; Kinesis speaks its own API, so clients, Connect pipelines, and skills do not transfer (Amazon MSK is the AWS answer for that).
- Your partition keys are uneven: a single hot key is capped at 1 MB/s and 1,000 records per second per shard, and on-demand mode cannot absorb that.
- You may leave AWS later; the workload and its tooling are tied to the platform.

## How it runs

Fully managed and serverless: create a stream, choose provisioned shards or on-demand capacity, and pay per shard hour and payload (or per GB on-demand). There is no connector framework; Firehose, Lambda, and Managed Service for Apache Flink fill that role. Cross-region replication is your own consumers' job.

## Details

### General

| Attribute | Value |
| --- | --- |
| License | Commercial |
| Deployment | Managed, Serverless |
| Workload | Streaming |
| Operational complexity | Low |
| Pricing | Subscription |
| Documentation | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kinesis/ |

### Event Streaming

| Attribute | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Protocol | Own API: not Kafka |
| Consumption model | Replayable log; consumers track position per shard |
| Storage | Managed shards; 24 hours to 365 days retention |
| What you run | Nothing: AWS runs it; shards are the only knob |
| Scaling | On-demand splits shards automatically; provisioned is your shard count |
| Multi-region | None built in: replicate across regions with your own consumers |
| Delivery guarantee | At-least-once: producer and consumer retries duplicate |
| Connectors | No connector framework; Firehose, Lambda and Managed Flink instead |
| Transformations | None in the stream; transform in Lambda or Managed Flink |
| Billing unit | Shard hours and PUT payload units, or per GB plus stream hours |

## Capabilities

- [Event Streaming](https://matca.io/capabilities/event-streaming)

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Source: https://matca.io/amazon-kinesis-data-streams
Last updated: 2026-08-31T11:40:47.829Z