What it is: A shard is the basic unit of capacity in a Kinesis data stream.

What it’s for:

• Scale ingestion (writes) and consumption (reads).
• Distribute streaming records across multiple shards.

Key ideas:

• More shards = more throughput capacity (higher parallelism).
• Producers write records to shards; consumers read from shards.

Exam cues:

• “need higher stream throughput” → increase shard count.
• “scale streaming capacity” → shards.

Hard words (English + IPA + Vietnamese meaning):

• *shard* /ʃɑːrd/: phân mảnh (đơn vị chia tải)
• *throughput* /ˈθruːpʊt/: thông lượng
• *parallelism* /ˈpærəlelɪzəm/: tính song song
• *ingestion* /ɪnˈdʒestʃən/: thu nhận dữ liệu vào