Amazon DynamoDB is a fully-managed NoSQL database service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It offers single-digit millisecond performance and virtually unlimited data storage, and it can easily be tuned to support any throughput required for your workload, at any scale. Since its launch in January 2012, DynamoDB has come a remarkably long way and consistently evolves to support additional features, enabling more businesses and enterprises to leverage the scale of this NoSQL offering.

Welcome to the first chapter of Amazon DynamoDB – The Definitive Guide, where Mike and I, Aman, dive into all things NoSQL, focusing on DynamoDB. We’ll explore its backstory, how it can supercharge your applications, and how it frees you from the hassles of managing clusters and instances. Learning NoSQL and DynamoDB isn’t too tough, but our aim with this book is to share everything we’ve learned to make your journey smoother. That’s why we’ve titled it The Definitive Guide – it’s your go-to resource for mastering DynamoDB.

The book is for those of you who are in roles such as software architects, developers, engineering managers, data engineers, product owners, or traditional database administrators. The book itself will provide you with all the skills and knowledge needed to make the most of DynamoDB for your application. This means benefiting from predictable performance at scale, while also being highly available, fault-tolerant, and requiring minimal ongoing management. I could continue listing the service’s benefits and why you should choose it for your applications, but it might be more valuable if you read through examples and success stories of other customers later in this chapter. Before we get started, let’s learn about Mike’s relationship with DynamoDB, in his own words.

My (Mike) journey into the world of DynamoDB has been a tale of two paths. The first path was to overall enlightenment, which was not as simple as I thought it might be – and that is what in part has led to this book. I wanted to share my knowledge, the way I approached data modeling, and how I had to unlearn some core concepts from the relational database world that then gave me that lightbulb moment when working with DynamoDB.

The second path was knowing where DynamoDB fits in my toolset, how to take advantage of the astonishing number of features that come baked into the service, and lastly, knowing when not to try and make workloads fit when there are more practical technologies out there. While DynamoDB can work for the majority of your database workloads, we need to be realistic and understand what it is not suited for, and that is where being armed with the right knowledge lets us make better, informed decisions about our database choices.

In this chapter, we will dive into DynamoDB’s position in today’s database market and trace its evolution in time. Subsequently, we will explore real-world use cases showcasing the impressive scale and volume regularly achieved by DynamoDB, demonstrating its battle-hardened capabilities beyond routine customer traffic.

We will then evaluate which workloads DynamoDB is suited for and how it can easily become one of the most used tools in your set of database technologies once you qualify DynamoDB as the right fit for the use case. There are many additional database technologies that do their own job extremely well, so knowing when to offload duties to the right technology is key in our decision making.

By the end of this chapter, you will have enough background knowledge and plenty of excitement to start setting up a working environment and looking at some useful tools we can leverage in preparation for getting hands-on with DynamoDB.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• NoSQL and DynamoDB in the current database market
• DynamoDB case studies
• Workloads not suited for DynamoDB