Item: Amazon DynamoDB
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have evaluated use cases for serverless applications ranging from simple key-value storage to complex "single table" designs for transactional data. The business requirement was to provide a straightforward, and well-performing data persistence layer for these applications, without the need of provisioning capacity. One particular use case models a language class booking system that is capable of handling bookings, cancellations of classes, and their respective seat bookings, models the teachers, teacher managers and the learners, and their actions too.

Pros and Cons

Low latency read and write throughput
Streaming data to consumers
Transactions

Secondary index management
Migration tooling
Point in time recovery performance

Return on Investment

Cost savings for low to mid-tier traffic levels
Database administration costs reduced
Developer experience improvement

Scalability

With on-demand scalability, although more expensive than provisioned, little effort is required to respond to rapidly increasing workloads. However, like with any event-driven systems, defensive programming is required to retry failed workloads, and to work around transient issues over the network.

Performance

Most trivial read operations run with a very low latency, depending on the partition key structure. Extra considerations need to be applied at long paginated result sets, but those can still be very very fast.

Alternatives Considered

MongoDB and Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)

Lesser flexibility but better performance, and more predictable development support are the key points where Amazon DynamoDB comes out on top, when compared to 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

AWS Lambda, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for a simple serverless key/value storage where the use case is already using AWS. With careful design, it is also capable of handling ecommerce or other transactional persistence.

It is less suited for applications where data access patterns vary frequently, or flexibility is required for data queries.

Perfect for serverless transactional workloads

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon DynamoDB