Service Comparison
- Kinesis Data Streams (KDS): real-time, custom consumers, manual shard management, 1-365 day retention.
- Kinesis Data Firehose: near-real-time delivery to S3, Redshift, OpenSearch, or HTTP endpoints with built-in transformation.
- Kinesis Data Analytics: real-time SQL or Apache Flink queries on streaming data.
- Enhanced fan-out provides dedicated throughput per consumer on KDS.
Scaling and Performance
- Each shard supports 1 MB/s or 1,000 records/s ingest, and 2 MB/s read.
- Resharding (split/merge) adjusts throughput capacity.
- Firehose automatically scales; no shard management needed.
- Use random partition keys to distribute data evenly across shards.
Exam Cues
- Need real-time with custom processing: Kinesis Data Streams.
- Need fully managed delivery to S3/Redshift: Kinesis Data Firehose.
- Need real-time SQL on streams: Kinesis Data Analytics.
- Need higher read throughput per consumer: enhanced fan-out.
Practice Kinesis Questions
Put your knowledge to the test with practice questions.