I only ran some perf testing and haven't used Kinesis in production yet but perf testing I ran end to end was < 1 sec end to end for a couple of thousand record

I only ran some perf testing and haven't used Kinesis in production yet but perf testing I ran end to end was < 1 sec end to end for a couple of thousand records per second using 3 shards. The reads per second are a lot lower than the writes per second because readers are expected to batch reads - you get 1000 puts/sec/shard vs. 5 reads/sec/shard, but 1 MB/sec read throughput and 2 MB /sec write throughput in shard, so you can read faster than you can write (and catch up if you fall behind). You won't get low millisec or microsec responses because Kinesis is replicating messages to multiple stores for resiliency.