Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Overview

Domain expertise for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. This skill covers streaming tables and Amazon S3 delivery, which provide serverless, fully managed delivery from a KDS stream directly to Apache Iceberg tables on S3 Tables or to general-purpose S3 buckets — no consumers, no Firehose, no Flink required for append-only delivery.

Delivery is configured as a channel on a stream via CreateChannel. Channels consume no shard capacity and no enhanced fan-out slots, so they do not compete with existing consumers.

The AWS MCP server is recommended for executing AWS operations. When the MCP server is not available, use the AWS CLI or shell commands instead.

Which Workflow Do You Need?

Prerequisites

Both destinations require an ON_DEMAND stream — provisioned-mode streams are not supported. Each channel also needs an IAM service execution role trusted by kinesis.amazonaws.com, and a destination in the same Region as the stream.

Hard Limits to Check First

These rule out the feature entirely, so confirm them before designing a solution:

• Append-only — no CDC, upserts, or deletes
• No schema evolution — a schema change means deleting and recreating the channel
• No backfill — only records produced after the channel is ACTIVE are delivered
• No transformations — records are delivered as-is
• New table per channel — cannot deliver into an existing Iceberg table
• Data freshness is 300–900 seconds — not sub-minute
• Same Region only — cross-account is supported, cross-Region is not

If any of these block the customer, recommend Managed Service for Apache Flink instead.

Additional Resources

• KDS Developer Guide
• KDS API Reference
• S3 Tables Developer Guide
• Glue Schema Registry