Enhanced fan-out gives each Kinesis Data Streams consumer its own dedicated throughput (2 MB/sec per shard) with low-latency push delivery — so multiple consumers don’t compete for the shard’s shared read capacity.
Standard vs enhanced fan-out
With standard consumers, all consumers share a shard’s 2 MB/sec read limit, so adding consumers slows everyone. Enhanced fan-out gives each registered consumer its own 2 MB/sec pipe with lower latency. The tell is “multiple consumers need independent, low-latency reads from the same stream.”
Test yourself
Several applications must each read the same Kinesis stream in real time without competing for throughput or slowing each other down. What should you use?
- Standard shared consumers
- Enhanced fan-out consumers
- A single consumer that forwards data
- More data retention
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation
Correct answer: B. Enhanced fan-out gives each consumer its own dedicated 2 MB/sec throughput with low latency, so consumers don’t compete. Standard consumers (A) share the shard’s read limit; a forwarding consumer (C) adds a bottleneck; retention (D) affects replay, not throughput contention.
Related topics
Kinesis Data Streams · Kinesis shards · Kinesis Data Firehose
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