How Multiple Independent Consumers Work
~8 min read
Why reading from Kinesis doesn't remove data, unlike SQS.
How Multiple Independent Consumers Work is a Pro topic
Sign in, then upgrade to Pro or Power to unlock this topic and the full AWS curriculum.
Key points
- •Reading from Kinesis doesn't remove data — unlike SQS's delete-after-consume model
- •Each independent consumer tracks its own position via a sequence number and checkpoint
- •Multiple consumers can be at completely different points in the stream simultaneously with no interference
- •The Kinesis Client Library typically manages checkpointing (often backed by a DynamoDB table) so consumers resume correctly after a restart