There are very few suitable use cases for DynamoDB • Hacker News Board

Re: There are very few suitable use cases for DynamoDB

#141

Post by hox » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 2:45 AM UTC

apetresc wrote: post #63

hox wrote: post #15

The biggest issue faced with DynamoDB from my perspective has been the problem with any hosted service - that is, the operational stability is in the hands of others entrusted with operating a massive multi-tenant system, and any outage cannot follow your own operational recovery mechanisms unless you plan for failover yourself. And the moment you plan for failover, you need to evaluate why you don't just handle the…

There are many things people justifiably complain about DynamoDB, but operational support has rarely been one of them.

Dynamodb experienced a severe outage in us-east in September of 2015, dropping the service to three nines of uptime on just the single event. During the incident there was little-to-no knowledge of when service would be restored, so companies that relied on the service were flying blind.

Such an outage can sometimes be mitigated when operations are internal to a company; but with DynamoDB, one has to build internal failover or implement a complex cross-region replication scheme. The complexity and reliability starts to reduce the attractiveness of the hosted service in general.

Re: There are very few suitable use cases for DynamoDB

#142

Post by rushi_agrawal » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 8:36 AM UTC

If DynamoDB guys can come up with a mechanism similar to their CPU credits concept, that'd be a really nice feature to have. Of course it can't be as straightforward as CPU credits.

Re: There are very few suitable use cases for DynamoDB

#143

Post by nw-fcx » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 10:44 AM UTC

grogenaut wrote: post #132

nw-fcx wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been able to improve my partitioning by adding a random suffix from a small set to the key for the writes, and then just trying all suffixes for the reads. Because my work load was relatively write-heavy (used at least ~10x more write capacity than read capacity), and because most of the read capacity was consumed by the size of the entries and not the lookups (so I didn't even have a linear increase in the need…

What were you using as keys. I heavily use Dynamo and use uuids for about every key

Some domain data that was way too coarse, but seemed like the right thing to query by.

Re: There are very few suitable use cases for DynamoDB

#144

Post by dijit » Mon, Jul 10, 2017, 1:43 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #140

dijit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you don't mind if I piggyback on this to echo this sentiment. Although I dislike MySQL for its many gotchas (data corruption level stuff too!) I was looking for a _long_ _long_ time for a high consistency NoSQL database.. we basically need document storage of large binary data. Ironically literally nothing in NoSQL land does write-through to disk, they just write to vfs and hope it works; additionally, those t…

Key-value document storage of large binary data... isn't that S3?

Yeah, shame we were pushing too much for the 5GB/s cap.

Also, their consistency model is hidden and they've lost data before.. so not selling points.

Re: There are very few suitable use cases for DynamoDB

#145

Post by ezulich » Mon, Jul 10, 2017, 11:37 PM UTC

ParadisoShlee wrote: post #56

Use case. Use case. Use case.

Full disclosure: I am a member of DynamoDB team at AWS, but my opinions here are mine only

Here are some of DynamoDB customers describing their use cases:

- DataXu: "How DataXu scaled its System to handle billions of events with DynamoDB" -- https://youtu.be/lDiI0JMf_yQ?t=765 (from AWS re:Invent 2016)

- Lyft: “Lyft Easily Scales Up its Ride Location Tracking System with Amazon DynamoDB” -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlTbaPXj-jc. The story "AWS Helps Fuel Lyft's Expansion" in InformationWeek mentions Lyft's use of DynamoDB as well: http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-ser...

- Under Armour implemented cross-region replication using DynamoDB: https://youtu.be/NtaTC2Fq7Wo?t=699

- Amazon.com: Amazon Marketplace shares their story of migration to DynamoDB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gllNauRR8GM

Finally, DynamoDB was created because Amazon needed a highly reliable and scalable key/value database. As Werner Vogels said it in his blog post announcement of DynamoDB back in 2012 (http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb....):

"This non-relational, or NoSQL, database was targeted at use cases that were core to the Amazon ecommerce operation, such as the shopping cart and session service."

Re: There are very few suitable use cases for DynamoDB

#146

Post by ezulich » Mon, Jul 10, 2017, 11:52 PM UTC

Full disclosure: I am a member of DynamoDB team at AWS, but my opinions here are mine only

On the topic of DynamoDB use cases, here are some of DynamoDB users describing their use cases:

- DataXu: "How DataXu scaled its System to handle billions of events with DynamoDB" -- https://youtu.be/lDiI0JMf_yQ?t=765 (from AWS re:Invent 2016)

- Lyft: “Lyft Easily Scales Up its Ride Location Tracking System with Amazon DynamoDB” -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlTbaPXj-jc. The story "AWS Helps Fuel Lyft's Expansion" in InformationWeek mentions Lyft's use of DynamoDB as well: http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-ser...

- Under Armour implemented cross-region replication using DynamoDB: https://youtu.be/NtaTC2Fq7Wo?t=699

- Amazon.com: Amazon Marketplace shares their story of migration to DynamoDB and why they did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gllNauRR8GM

Finally, DynamoDB was created because Amazon needed a highly reliable and scalable key/value database. As Werner Vogels said it in his blog post announcement of DynamoDB back in 2012 (http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb....):

"This non-relational, or NoSQL, database was targeted at use cases that were core to the Amazon ecommerce operation, such as the shopping cart and session service."