Item: Amazon DynamoDB
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use AWS dynamo Db to store key value pairs for our business logic layer. We store details like last log in date, some config values and other non relational data.

Pros and Cons

Integrates easily with other AWS infrastructure
Easy to use interface on AWS console
Scales easily with load

Integrations with orms
Migrations to other no sql databases

Return on Investment

Less dependency on sql db
Faster to read and write than sql db
No need to manage db connections

This is true for most use cases. Specially for no sql and non relational data. AWS does the replica management itself. By defaults it keeps resources close to the one specified, but it has a decent load detection algorithm that kicks in after a few minutes of high load and scales automatically

Performance

Customers see less load times, owing to dynamo dbs performance advantage over our sql db. Having a cache layer around dynamo access worked really well for us since we don’t write a lot to our dynamo db instance. Since our ec2 instances and dynamo share the same region, we see no performance bottleneck due to region

Alternatives Considered

MongoDB Atlas

Mongo services are outside of our Vpc and are on a different network. Since most of our infra is on AWS, dynamo by AWS was a natural choice. Most of our engineers are familiar with AWS sdk and the console so that brought in a much smaller learning curve for our engineering team

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Amazon DynamoDB again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

Likelihood to Recommend

We write custom wrappers around cloud derives so within our codebase, anything non relational goes to dynamo. It’s way faster than a db query and works well with our existing vos

Dynamic scaling done easy by dynamoDB

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon DynamoDB