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DynamoDB 10 years later

amazon.science

121–130 of 225 posts

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#121

As a developer, I really have a love-hate relationship with Dynamo. I love how fast and easy it is to setup and get rolling. The partitioning scheme came off as confusing and opaque but I think that says more about Amazon's documentation than the scheme itself. I do not like that there's no really third party tooling integration to be able to query. Their UI in the console is _so freaking terrible_ yet you have no ot…

My experience exactly.

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No one uses DynamoDB alone Almost every single team at Amazon that I can think of off the top of my head uses DynamoDB (or DDB + S3) as its sole data store. I know that there are teams out there using relational DBs as well (especially in analytics), but in my day-to-day working with a constantly changing variety of teams that run customer-facing apps, I haven't seen RDS/Redis/etc being used in months.

The thing about Amazon is that it is massive . In my neck of the woods, I've got the complete opposite experience. So many teams have the exact DDB induced infrastructure sprawl as described by the GP (e.g. supplemental RDBMS, Elastic, caching layers, etc..). Which says nothing of DDB. It's an god-tier tool if what you need matches what it's selling. However, I see too many teams reach for it by default without doing…

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Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#123

As a developer, I really have a love-hate relationship with Dynamo. I love how fast and easy it is to setup and get rolling. The partitioning scheme came off as confusing and opaque but I think that says more about Amazon's documentation than the scheme itself. I do not like that there's no really third party tooling integration to be able to query. Their UI in the console is _so freaking terrible_ yet you have no ot…

Don't think this is a fair reason to avoid DynamoDB. There are reasonably better alternatives:

- DynamoDB Workbench (free, AWS official): https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

- Dynobase (paid, third-party): https://dynobase.dev/

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At his rank at AWS I don’t know if money was such an issue. He strikes me as a person who cares deeply about the underlying tech. But I have no idea one way or the other.

I think I've seen you post something similar on r/aws about how Rick was "top DynamoDb person at AWS" (apologies if that wasn't you). I think you are overestimating Rick's "rank". I just looked him up (I had not heard of him before seeing his name mentioned on r/aws a few days ago) and he was an L7 TPM/Practice Manager in AWS's sales organization. That's not really a notably high position, and in the grand scheme of…

You never heard of Rick Houlihan? He is the 90% of DynamoDB Evangelism... At the same time you are able to this internal lookups? Do you work with DynamoDB?

AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB (DAT401) https://youtu.be/HaEPXoXVf2k

AWS re:Invent 2019: [REPEAT 1] Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns (DAT403-R1) https://youtu.be/6yqfmXiZTlM

AWS re:Invent 2020: Amazon DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 1 https://youtu.be/MF9a1UNOAQo

AWS re:Invent 2020: Amazon DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 2 https://youtu.be/_KNrRdWD25M

AWS re:Invent 2021 - DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns https://youtu.be/xfxBhvGpoa0

Amazon DynamoDB | Office Hours with Rick Houlihan: Breaking down the design process for NoSQL applications https://www.twitch.tv/videos/761425806

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#125
post #9
post #2

We're at early stages of planning an architecture where we offload pre-rendered JSON views of PostgreSQL onto a key value store optimised for read only high volume. Considering DynamoDB, S3, Elastic, etc. (We'll probably start without the pre-render bit, or store it in PostgreSQL until it becomes a problem). When looking at DynamoDB I noticed that there was a surprising amount of discussion around the requirement for…

There's not really magic with s3, you still need to name things with coherrent prefixes to spread around the load. DynamoDB is almost simple enough to learn in a day. And if you're doing nothing with it, you're only really paying for storage. Good luck with your decisions.

S3 naming no longer matters for performance. Rejoice.

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#126
I haven't run into anyone who uses Dynamo for anything other than managing Terraform backend state locking. And I think that's still the best use case for it: you just want to store a couple random key-values somewhere and have more functionality than AWS Parameter Store. Trying to build anything large-scale with it will probably leave you wanting.

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#127

I can safely say that the team members working in DynamoDB are very skilled and they care deeply about the product. They really work hard and think of interesting solutions to a lot of problems that their biggest customers face which is great from a product standpoint. There are some pretty smart people working there. Engineering, however, was a disaster story. Code is horribly written and very few tests are maintain…

I worked at a company who re-implemented the entire Dynamo paper and API, and it was exactly the same story. Completely eliminated all my illusions about the supposed superiority of distributed systems. It was a mound of tires held together with duct tape, with a tiki torch in each tire.

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#128

I can safely say that the team members working in DynamoDB are very skilled and they care deeply about the product. They really work hard and think of interesting solutions to a lot of problems that their biggest customers face which is great from a product standpoint. There are some pretty smart people working there. Engineering, however, was a disaster story. Code is horribly written and very few tests are maintain…

>Engineering, however, was a disaster story. Code is horribly written and very few tests are maintained to make sure deployments go without issues. There was too much emphasis on deployment and getting fixes/features out over making sure it won't break anything else. It was a common scenario to release a new feature and put duct tape all around it to make sure it "works". And way too many operational issues. There ar…

You throw bodies at it. A small bunch of people will be overworked, stressed, constantly fighting fires and struggling to fight technical debt, implement features, and keep the thing afloat. Production is always a hair away from falling over but luck and grit keeps it running. To the team it's a nightmare, to the business everything is fine.

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#129

As a developer, I really have a love-hate relationship with Dynamo. I love how fast and easy it is to setup and get rolling. The partitioning scheme came off as confusing and opaque but I think that says more about Amazon's documentation than the scheme itself. I do not like that there's no really third party tooling integration to be able to query. Their UI in the console is _so freaking terrible_ yet you have no ot…

Don't think this is a fair reason to avoid DynamoDB. There are reasonably better alternatives: - DynamoDB Workbench (free, AWS official): https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg... - Dynobase (paid, third-party): https://dynobase.dev/

Plus there is the local install ( Only for Dev and Testing purposes...)

"Deploying DynamoDB Locally on Your Computer" https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#130

As a developer, I really have a love-hate relationship with Dynamo. I love how fast and easy it is to setup and get rolling. The partitioning scheme came off as confusing and opaque but I think that says more about Amazon's documentation than the scheme itself. I do not like that there's no really third party tooling integration to be able to query. Their UI in the console is _so freaking terrible_ yet you have no ot…

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