AWS Kinesis · Rate Limits

Kinesis Rate Limits

Kinesis Data Streams enforces a mix of per-account/per-region control-plane API TPS limits and per-shard data-plane throughput limits (1 MB/s or 1000 records/s write per shard, 2 MB/s or 5 GetRecords/s read per shard). Limits are scoped per AWS account per region; many control-plane limits are adjustable via Service Quotas. Exceeding throughput returns ProvisionedThroughputExceededException.

Kinesis Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for AWS Kinesis on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 16 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests_per_second, bytes_per_second, shards, streams, and hours.

The profile also includes 5 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled, provisionedThroughputExceeded, and limitExceeded.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Streaming, and Real-Time.

16 Limits Throttle: 400
Rate LimitingStreamingReal-Time

Limits

PutRecord (per shard) shard
requests_per_second · second
1000
Each shard supports up to 1000 records/s and 1 MB/s write.
PutRecords (per shard) shard
bytes_per_second · second
1048576
500 records max per request; 10 MiB request limit; 10 MiB max per record (burst).
GetRecords (per shard) shard
requests_per_second · second
5
Returns ProvisionedThroughputExceededException for 5 seconds after a 10 MB response.
GetRecords data read rate (per shard) shard
bytes_per_second · second
2097152
SubscribeToShard (Enhanced Fan-Out) consumer-shard
requests_per_second · second
1
One call per second per registered consumer per shard.
GetShardIterator shard
requests_per_second · second
5
ListShards stream
requests_per_second · second
1000
DescribeStream account
requests_per_second · second
10
DescribeStreamSummary account
requests_per_second · second
20
CreateStream / DeleteStream / ListStreams account
requests_per_second · second
5
On-Demand Standard default throughput stream
bytes_per_second · second
4194304
4 MB/s write / 8 MB/s read default; auto-scales to 200 MB/s write or higher in select regions.
On-Demand max throughput (US-East-1, US-West-2, EU-West-1) stream
bytes_per_second · second
10737418240
10 GB/s write, 20 GB/s read with support-ticket increase.
Provisioned default shard quota account/region
shards
see Service Quotas - defaults 20000 / 6000 / 1000 by region
On-demand streams default account
streams
50
Stream retention stream
hours
8760
Default 24 hours; max 365 days (8760 hours).
Registered consumers per stream stream
consumers
50
50 on On-Demand Advantage, 20 on Standard / Provisioned.

Policies

Provisioned throughput exceptions
When per-shard write or read throughput is exceeded, the API returns ProvisionedThroughputExceededException; AWS SDKs implement automatic retry with exponential backoff.
Backoff and retry
Use exponential backoff with jitter on throttling. KCL and KPL libraries handle this automatically for typical workloads.
Capacity-mode switching
A stream can switch between On-Demand and Provisioned modes only twice in any 24-hour window.
Service Quotas adjustments
Most control-plane and shard-count limits are adjustable via the AWS Service Quotas console; some (like UpdateShardCount) require an AWS Support case.
Resharding
Use SplitShard / MergeShards (provisioned) or rely on Kinesis auto-scaling (on-demand) to keep per-shard limits ahead of producer/consumer load.

Sources