All 7 Amazon Kinesis & Data Streaming questions
More in Amazon Kinesis & Data Streaming
What is Amazon Kinesis and what type of problems does it solve? What is the difference between Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, and Kinesis Data Analytics? How does the partition key affect how records are distributed across shards in Kinesis? How do consumer applications read and process data from a Kinesis Data Stream? What is enhanced fan out in Kinesis Data Streams, and why is it useful for multiple consumers? How does data retention and replay work in Kinesis Data Streams?
Advertisement
Back to results for “Monitoring”
AWS › Amazon Kinesis & Data Streaming

What is a shard in Kinesis Data Streams, and how does it affect throughput?

Intermediate

Answer

A shard is the base unit of capacity in a Kinesis Data Stream, with each shard supporting up to one megabyte per second of write throughput and up to two megabytes per second of read throughput, meaning the total throughput capacity of your stream scales directly with the number of shards you provision, and you can increase or decrease this number as your data volume changes.
aws kinesis update-shard-count --stream-name my-stream --target-shard-count 4 --scaling-type UNIFORM_SCALING
Real-world example A streaming analytics platform increases the shard count of its Kinesis stream from two to eight during a product launch event to handle the expected surge in incoming event volume, then scales back down afterward.

Common follow-ups: How is data distributed across shards within a stream?;What happens if a stream receives more traffic than its shards can handle?

Auto Scaling Groups;Monitoring (CloudWatch)
All 7 Amazon Kinesis & Data Streaming questions