A new event stream's volume is unpredictable — spiky, ranging 10x between quiet and peak. The team wants no capacity planning or shard management. Which Kinesis mode applies?
A.Provisioned mode with manual shard splits
Provisioned mode means choosing shard counts — exactly what the team wants to avoid.
B.On-demand mode
Correct. On-demand auto-manages capacity for unpredictable streams.
C.Enhanced fan-out consumers
Enhanced fan-out gives dedicated per-consumer throughput — it doesn't size the stream itself.
D.Kinesis Data Firehose delivery to S3
Firehose delivers to destinations; the question is about stream capacity.
Why this answer
On-demand mode scales shard capacity automatically with throughput (default 4 MB/s, scales to GB/s) — no shard math. Provisioned mode requires forecasting and managing shards; fan-out is a consumer pattern, not a capacity mode.
Correct answer: B · Last reviewed 2026-10-26
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