Using DAX for high-volume delivery
After learning about various aspects and concepts of DAX, let’s compare its performance with reading from the DynamoDB web service directly. As a reminder, DynamoDB stores data on warm Solid-State Drives (SSDs) under the hood, and all reads require seeking these SSDs for data before decrypting them using your specified encryption context type (3). In contrast, with DAX, the cached data is stored in memory, which results in reading speeds that are tens of times faster.
For the purposes of this demonstration, I will be creating a new DynamoDB table called chapter14
with a partition key attribute named PK
and no sort key attribute. This means that each unique value of the PK
attribute will identify a single item in the table. Using the same DAX cluster that I created in the previous section, I will measure the end-to-end latency of performing reads from an EC2 instance in the same VPC as the DAX cluster. While I am not a professional programmer...