API Version: 2013-03-31

This operation returns the following information about the stream: the current status of the stream, the stream Amazon Resource Name (ARN), and an array of shard objects that comprise the stream. For each shard object there is information about the hash key and sequence number ranges that the shard spans, and the IDs of any earlier shards that played in a role in a MergeShards or SplitShard operation that created the shard. A sequence number is the identifier associated with every record ingested in the Amazon Kinesis stream. The sequence number is assigned by the Amazon Kinesis service when a record is put into the stream.

You can limit the number of returned shards using the Limit parameter. The number of shards in a stream may be too large to return from a single call to DescribeStream. You can detect this by using the HasMoreShards flag in the returned output. HasMoreShards is set to true when there is more data available.

If there are more shards available, you can request more shards by using the shard ID of the last shard returned by the DescribeStream request, in the ExclusiveStartShardId parameter in a subsequent request to DescribeStream. DescribeStream is a paginated operation.

DescribeStream has a limit of 10 transactions per second per account.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/kinesis/2013-12-02/APIReference/API_DescribeStream.html