Item: Amazon DynamoDB
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon DynamoDB

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon DynamoDB is used for handling non-relational database workload that includes events and IoT specific data for analytics purposes company wide, full managed at AWS.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It is easy to set up from the scratch, since it's a fully managed NoSQL database-as-a-service from AWS.
Data sharding is automatic, making it easy to maintain in the long run without the need for provisioning for capacity upfront.

Cons

Being multi-modal (supports both key-value and document), query performance is worse than purely key-value store DB. Query performance can be improved.
There is no control over how the data is portioned which makes it hard from a compliance perspective. Adding some kind of dashboard for this in the management console will help.

Return on Investment

Positive impact on ROI due to reduction is staff and expertise needed to set up and maintain the NoSQL database instances through the use of fully managed Amazon DynamoDB.
Positive impact on ROI by not needing to provision database capacity upfront for peak loads.

Alternatives Considered

Azure Cosmos DB, Couchbase, MongoDB, Redis and Oracle NoSQL Database

MongoDB is mostly document store while Amazon DynamoDB supports both key/value and document store making it more versatile. Azure Cosmos DB is multi-modal like Amazon DynamoDB and it makes more sense when you have data already in Azure Cloud. If you are mostly using AWS then DynamoDB is a better choice. Redis Labs and Oracle NoSQL is only key/value store.

Other Software Used

Oracle NoSQL Database, Amazon Aurora, MongoDB, MongoDB Atlas

Likelihood to Renew

It is clear what our peak capacity is, which makes it not economical to be using a fully managed instance of a NoSQL database/Amazon DynamoDB. It is economical to run a NoSQL database in the cloud, but not have it fully-managed to reduce OpEx and increase flexibility to optimize performance and replication.

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon DynamoDB is very well suited when you are already running other Amazon services and/or already have the data in AWS. It is also well suited when the queries are simple and there is no need to file tune the underlying infrastructure. It is not well suited when the amount of data is very large and there is some expectation of the capacity needed upfront without any major peak workload considerations.

Amazon DynamoDB Feature Ratings

Comments

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Full managed NoSQL option that is easy to setup and deploy.