Item: Amazon DynamoDB
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DynamoDB has made it quick and easy for us to prototype and build out our new features. We've spun up a few microservices hosting the data in DynamoDB and the NoSQL database has made our architecture very flexible and future-proof. It's been an easy way for us to denormalize parts of our data and start stripping out parts of our monolith and implementing it in microservices.

Pros and Cons

Great documentation.
Quick and easy to use.
Scales well with our use cases.

Querying functionality is limited which limits our use cases.
Limited resources to train developers from adjusting SQL to NoSQL.
Can be costly for projects where we have to spin up many environments.

Return on Investment

Microservices built with DynamoDB have resulted in more rapid development both for engineering and product.
Easier to convince devs to work within AWS than our monolith.
Easy to scale.

Alternatives Considered

Firebase and Azure Cosmos DB

Teams at our company briefly looking into other cloud services and we even have a feature using Azure, but Amazon DynamoDB ultimately was selected as it was easier for our company to just work with one suite of web services.

Key Insights

Do you think Amazon DynamoDB delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon DynamoDB's feature set?

Yes

Did Amazon DynamoDB live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Amazon DynamoDB go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon DynamoDB again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Lambda, Atlassian JIRA Align (formerly AgileCraft)

Usability

Very easy to use and we can quickly prototype something using DynamoDB to verify its viability.

Support Rating

I haven't dealt with the support for Amazon DynamoDB personally.

Likelihood to Recommend

In my experience, we've found that DynamoDB has made it very easy for us to denormalize data and transition those pieces of data/functionality to AWS. The NoSQL structure makes it much simpler for us to implement data sharing use cases versus our existing implementation of SQL. Outside of these cases, we haven't found a big enough advantage over our current SQL structure to warrant switching over.

Easy to use and scalable solution

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon DynamoDB