Work within Kinesis Data Streams on-demand mode's automatic scaling limits without triggering write throttling
domain: aws-kinesis · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Know that on-demand mode provisions up to 2x your highest observed peak write throughput over the trailing 30 days
Expect throttling if traffic exceeds 2x the previous peak within a 15-minute window, and build retry logic for throttled requests during that scale-up
Size expectations for new streams around the default starting capacity of 4 MB/s write / 8 MB/s read
If a single shard exceeds 500 KB/s incoming, expect Kinesis to auto-split that shard within about 15 minutes
Check regional ceilings: 10 GB/s write / 20 GB/s read in us-east-1, us-west-2, and eu-west-1; 200 MB/s / 400 MB/s by default elsewhere (request a limit increase for higher)
Remember the hard per-partition-key limit of 1 MB/s and 1,000 records/sec applies regardless of mode — fix skewed partition keys rather than relying on auto-scaling
Known gotchas
Exceeding the doubling threshold doesn't raise a distinct 'on-demand' error — you get the same throttling behavior as provisioned mode until Kinesis finishes scaling (up to ~15 minutes), and AWS's guidance is simply to retry
On-demand auto-scaling does not compensate for skewed partition keys; a hot key can keep throttling even in on-demand mode, and AWS recommends provisioned mode with manual shard splitting for that case
A stream can switch between on-demand and provisioned mode at most twice within a rolling 24-hour period
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