Shards, Partition Keys, and Throughput
~10 min read
How Kinesis divides a stream into parallel lanes and distributes records across them.
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Key points
- •Total throughput = sum of shard capacities; Provisioned mode requires manual shard planning, On-Demand scales automatically
- •Each shard: ~1MB/sec write, ~2MB/sec read (shared unless Enhanced Fan-Out)
- •Partition key determines shard assignment; same key = same shard = preserved relative order
- •Poor partition key choice creates hot shards, mirroring DynamoDB's hot partition problem