API Version: 2013-12-02

This operation adds a new Amazon Kinesis stream to your AWS account. A stream captures and transports data records that are continuously emitted from different data sources or producers. Scale-out within an Amazon Kinesis stream is explicitly supported by means of shards, which are uniquely identified groups of data records in an Amazon Kinesis stream.

You specify and control the number of shards that a stream is composed of. Each open shard can support up to 5 read transactions per second, up to a maximum total of 2 MB of data read per second. Each shard can support up to 1000 write transactions per second, up to a maximum total of 1 MB data written per second. You can add shards to a stream if the amount of data input increases and you can remove shards if the amount of data input decreases.

The stream name identifies the stream. The name is scoped to the AWS account used by the application. It is also scoped by region. That is, two streams in two different accounts can have the same name, and two streams in the same account, but in two different regions, can have the same name.

CreateStream is an asynchronous operation. Upon receiving a CreateStream request, Amazon Kinesis immediately returns and sets the stream status to CREATING. After the stream is created, Amazon Kinesis sets the stream status to ACTIVE. You should perform read and write operations only on an ACTIVE stream.

You receive a LimitExceededException when making a CreateStream request if you try to do one of the following:

Have more than five streams in the CREATING state at any point in time. Create more shards than are authorized for your account. Note: The default limit for an AWS account is 10 shards per stream. If you need to create a stream with more than 10 shards, contact AWS Support to increase the limit on your account.

You can use the DescribeStream operation to check the stream status, which is returned in StreamStatus.

CreateStream has a limit of 5 transactions per second per account.

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