# Create and manage Kinesis data streams
<a name="working-with-streams"></a>

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams ingests a large amount of data in real time, durably stores the data, and makes the data available for consumption. The unit of data stored by Kinesis Data Streams is a *data record*. A *data stream* represents a group of data records. The data records in a data stream are distributed into shards.

A *shard* has a sequence of data records in a stream. It serves as a base throughput unit of a Kinesis data stream. A shard supports 1 MB/s and 1000 records per second for *writes* and 2 MB/s for *reads* in both on-demand and provisioned capacity modes. The shard limits ensure predictable performance, making it easier to design and operate a highly reliable data streaming workflow. 

In this section, you learn how to set the capacity mode for the stream and how to create a stream using either the AWS Management Console or APIs. Then you can take additional actions on the stream. 

**Topics**
+ [Choose the right mode to stream in](how-do-i-size-a-stream.md)
+ [Create a stream using the AWS Management Console](how-do-i-create-a-stream.md)
+ [Create a stream using the APIs](kinesis-using-sdk-java-create-stream.md)
+ [Update a stream](updating-a-stream.md)
+ [List streams](kinesis-using-sdk-java-list-streams.md)
+ [List shards](kinesis-using-sdk-java-list-shards.md)
+ [Delete a stream](kinesis-using-sdk-java-delete-stream.md)
+ [Reshard a stream](kinesis-using-sdk-java-resharding.md)
+ [Change the data retention period](kinesis-extended-retention.md)
+ [Tag your Amazon Kinesis Data Streams resources](tagging.md)
+ [Handle large records](large-records.md)
+ [Perform resilience testing with AWS Fault Injection Service](kinesis-fis.md)