Well, for one, there is no streaming socket API, just HTTP. I suspect the 5 reads&#x2F;sec limit on shards is mainly due to multitenancy, but I could see this increasing in the future. Amazon has already improved the latency of Kinesis a fair amount, but it still has a ways to go before it matches Kafka.<p>We also have cases where we need many consumers reading a stream, so having that effectively limited to 5 concurrent consumers is a pretty tough limitation. Their solution to this is to just have consumers sleep on a failed poll, but that doesn&#x27;t really help if you want to scale out your ingestion. You don&#x27;t have that problem with Kafka.