Item: Amazon DynamoDB
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to store key-value account metadata that powers our analytics application. It is accessed via Python REST API and ultimately served in a web application.

Pros and Cons

Really easy to get started with and using the data
Strong fully managed service, making things like security, scalability and data replication trivial
Extremely low latency

Limited querying options, writing queries is tedious requires index, no table joins
Difficult to estimate and predict costs if load is not constant or unpredictable
400KB item capacity limit

Return on Investment

Way less time spent on DB management
Fast to get up and running when building a PoC product or some other experiment
monitoring/visibility tools are not user friendly

Scalability

We have had no issues with scale where Amazon DynamoDB is concerned. It has always been able to keep up with the demand/load

We host everything from AWS Ireland, and our customers experience extremely low latency. Granted it is a very straightforward use case and there is very little complexity in our queries, we access everything directly by the indexed key.

Alternatives Considered

MongoDB Atlas and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

More flexible and easier to get started with than RDS, but, in my opinion, much worse monitoring/cost and query/modeling complexity than MongoDB

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

MongoDB Atlas, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch

Likelihood to Recommend

It depends on the use case but, in my opinion, is more suited to frequently writing data and application states with fewer reads. If there is a need to do heavy reads or complex queries then Amazon DynamoDB might not be the right tool. In my experience, it can also be tricky to troubleshoot when there are problems/bugs, so something that provides better visibility/monitoring for a high-impact real-time application might be better suited.

Amazon DynamoDB is great in a pinch but consider your use case

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon DynamoDB