Ah! That actually explains the strange syntax I was seeing in the tutorials:

  // Create Stream `basic-stream-{3-7}`
  // dlog tool create -u ${distributedlog-uri} -r ${stream-prefix} -e ${stream-regex}
  ./distributedlog-core/bin/dlog tool create -u distributedlog://127.0.0.1:7000/messaging/distributedlog -r basic-stream- -e 3-7

You use a regex to progammatically create N streams, which would be N shards in Kinesis or N partitions in Kafka.