Let’s assume that our data producers put 100 records per second in aggregate, and each record is 35KB. In this case, the total data input rate is 3.4MB/sec (100 records/sec*35KB/record). For simplicity, we assume that the throughput and data size of each record are stable and constant throughout the day. Please note that we can dynamically adjust the throughput of our Amazon Kinesis stream at any time.

We first calculate the number of shards needed for our stream to achieve the required throughput. As one shard provides a capacity of 1MB/sec data input and supports 1000 records/sec, four shards provide a capacity of 4MB/sec data input and support 4000 records/sec. So a stream with four shards satisfies our required throughput of 3.4MB/sec at 100 records/sec.

We then calculate our monthly Kinesis Data Streams costs using Kinesis Data Streams pricing in the US-East Region:

• Shard Hour: One shard costs $0.015 per hour, or $0.36 per day ($0.015*24). Our stream has four shards so that it costs $1.44 per day ($0.36*4). For a month with 31 days, our monthly Shard Hour cost is $44.64 ($1.44*31).
• PUT Payload Unit (25KB): As our record is 35KB, each record contains two PUT Payload Units. Our data producers put 100 records or 200 PUT Payload Units per second in aggregate. That is 267,840,000 records or 535,680,000 PUT Payload Units per month. As one million PUT Payload Units cost $0.014, our monthly PUT Payload Units cost is $7.499 ($0.014*535.68).

Optionally, we can choose to increase the data retention period of our stream from 24 hours to up to 7 days. In this example, we assume that our data stream has extended data retention enabled throughout the whole month. Alternatively, we can choose to enable extended data retention only during occasions when extended data retention is critical for preventing data loss, which saves our cost on extended data retention.

• Extended Data Retention (up to 7 days): Extended data retention costs an extra $0.020 per shard hour. As our stream incurs 2,976 shard hours per month (4 shards*24 hours/day*31 days/month), our monthly Extended Data Retention cost is $59.52 ($0.020*2,976)

Adding the Shard Hour and PUT Payload Unit costs together, our total Amazon Kinesis Data Streams costs are $1.68 per day, or $52.14 per month. For $1.68 per day, we have a fully-managed streaming data infrastructure that enables us to continuously ingest 4MB of data per second, or 337GB of data per day in a reliable and elastic manner. Additionally, we can increase our Amazon Kinesis data stream retention period from 24 hours to up to 7 days for an extra $59.52 per month.

• Enhanced fan-out consumer-shard hours: Enhanced fan-out costs an extra $0.015 per shard, and this cost is additive per data consumer. As our stream incurs 2,976 shard hours per month (4 shards*24 hours/day*31 days/month), each consumer using enhanced fan-out throughout this period will incur a cost of $44.64 (2,976 x $0.015). Two consumers over the same period would incur a cost of $89.28.
• Enhanced fan-out data retrievals: Data retrieved from a stream by a consumer using enhanced fan-out incurs a charge of $0.013 per GB. If over a month, a two shard stream ingested 50,000 MB of data and 2 data consumers used enhanced fan-out and retrieved all of this data during the month, 100,000 MB (50,000 MB x 2 data consumers) of data would be retrieved, or 100 GB, incurring a charge of $1.30 (100 GB x $0.013 per GB).