How to: Kinesis Streams Gotchas and Limitations
- 🔸⏱  Kinesis Streams’ shards each only permit [5 reads per second](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/service-sizes-and-limits.html). If you are evenly distributing data across many shards, your read limit for the Stream will remain at 5 reads per second on aggregate, as each consuming application will need to check every single shard for new records. This puts a hard limit on the number of different consuming applications possible per Stream for a given maximum read latency.
   - For example, if you have 5 consuming applications reading data from one Stream with any number of shards, they cannot read with a latency of less than one second, as each of the 5 consumers will need to poll *each shard* every second, reaching the cap of 5 reads per second per shard.
	- [This blog post](https://brandur.org/kinesis-in-production) further discusses the performance and limitations of Kinesis in production.
-	💸 **Kinesis Streams are not included in the free tier.** Make sure if you do any experimentation with it on a personal account, you shut down the stream or it may run up unexpected costs (~$11 per shard-month.)

Kinesis Firehose
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