Create and manage Kinesis data streams

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams ingests a large amount of data in real time, durably stores the data, and makes the data available for consumption. The unit of data stored by Kinesis Data Streams is a data record. A data stream represents a group of data records. The data records in a data stream are distributed into shards.

A shard has a sequence of data records in a stream. It serves as a base throughput unit of a Kinesis data stream. A shard supports 1 MB/s and 1000 records per second for writes and 2 MB/s for reads in both on-demand and provisioned capacity modes. The shard limits ensure predictable performance, making it easier to design and operate a highly reliable data streaming workflow.

In this section, you learn how to set the capacity mode for the stream and how to create a stream using either the AWS Management Console or APIs. Then you can take additional actions on the stream.