Amazon Kinesis Data Streams versus Amazon MSK

05 Nov 2025

Learn how Amazon Kinesis Data Streams differs from Amazon MSK.

	Amazon Kinesis Data Streams	Amazon MSK
Scaling	1 MB or 1000 msg/sec per shard; up to 500 shards; you need to manually add/remove shards	30 brokers per cluster; you need add/remove brokers and reassign partitions manually
Max. message size	1 MB	configurable (default 1 MB)
Persistence	up to 365 days	forever (up to 16384 GiB per broker)
Replication	Multi-AZ	Multi-AZ (optional)
Order guarantee	within a shard	within a partition
Delivery guarantee	at least once	up to the consumer
Pricing	per shard hour	per broker hour + provisioned storage
Protocols	AWS Rest API	Kafka protocol
AWS Integrations	Lambda	Lambda
License	AWS only	open source (Apache Kafka)
Encryption at rest	yes	yes
Encryption in transit	yes	yes

Further reading