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DynamoDB 10 years later

amazon.science

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Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#181

Post by digitalgangsta »

salil999 wrote: post #65

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've worked at 5 different tech companies now - this is par for course. And every single one, wished they could go back and do it again, but at that point the product was too successful so they ran with it.

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#182

Post by dustingetz »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #128
vasili111 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

literally every co

if you want to know why capitalism causes this, start a startup and prioritize quality, do not get to market, do not raise money, do not pass go, watch dumpster fires with millions of betrayed and angry users raise their series d

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#183

Post by yftsui »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #127
salil999 wrote: post #65

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.

Dynamo paper and DynamoDB are two very different things…

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#184

Post by amzn-throw »

belter wrote: post #168
amzn-throw wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you expect the engineers on your team to know the top sales person at your company? This person might be responsible for the majority of evangelism and revenue for the company. Do you expect the SDEs to know about him? Again, no shot against against Rick - he is amazing, smart, technical, competent, and a deep owner. But the average SDE on the team won't know about these or watch these talks. There are too many de…

Are you calling the person who did the core DynamoDB Technical Deep Dive sessions at reInvent, for the last 4 years in a row, a sales person?

What do you think Solutions Architects and Developer Advocates (between the two groups who do most Re:invent sessions) are?

Hell, what do you think re:Invent is? It's a sales conference.

In any company you have two groups of people: Those that build the product, and those that sell it. Ultimately, solutions architects and developer advocates are there to help sell the product.

Of course Amazon is customer obsessed. And genuinely interested in ensuring customers have a good experience, and their technical needs are met - through education, support, and architectural guidance. But ultimately, that's what it is.

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#185

Post by amzn-throw »

gigatexal wrote: post #170
amzn-throw wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you expect the engineers on your team to know the top sales person at your company? This person might be responsible for the majority of evangelism and revenue for the company. Do you expect the SDEs to know about him? Again, no shot against against Rick - he is amazing, smart, technical, competent, and a deep owner. But the average SDE on the team won't know about these or watch these talks. There are too many de…

Maybe that was the problem. He cited that there was seemingly not enough effort in making DynamoDB better as evidenced by the many orthogonally very close other DBs that AWS promotes. If Rick was ears to the ground listening to customers and sending back feedback but it was falling on deaf ears that's enough ground for someone as high up and as influential and productive as him to leave. It also speaks to inner AWS t…

Based on what I know, that's not the case.

DDB is a steady ship. The explanation on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30009611 is likely the best explanation. L7 TPMs make the same money as L6 SDEs.

Getting promoted to L8 - director - is a monumental effort and likely seemed much harder than pursuing a comprable position at MongoDB.

Good for him for doing it, and for making Amazon take a long hard look at every way they failed in not keeping him.

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#186

Post by stickfigure »

afandian wrote: 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…

Take a look at Firestore / Google Cloud Datastore. It's pretty much exactly what you describe - fire and forget. There's no concept of "node" (at least not from the outside).

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#187

Post by jopsen »

gonzo41 wrote: post #9
afandian wrote: 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.

And S3 won't scale instantly... If your load is big enough :)

Everything has limits, but S3 is remarkably hard to break if used right.

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#188

Post by didip »

Zimnx wrote: post #174
didip wrote: post #101

To be honest, as a customer, it is hard for me to justify using DynamoDB. Some of this criticism can be out of date: 1. DynamoDB is not as convenient. There are a bit too many dials to turn. 2. DynamoDB does not have a SQL facade on top. 3. DynamoDB is proprietary, I believe there's no OSS API equivalent if you want to migrate out. 4. DynamoDB was kind of expensive. But it has been a while since I last check the pric…

Ad 3. Lot of people don't know about it, but there's a open source, free, and DynamoDB compatibile databse called ScyllaDB - API it's called Alternator to be specific.

I definitely didn't know about it before. Thanks!

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#189

Post by gautamdivgi »

sam0x17 wrote: post #153
salil999 wrote: post #65

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…

It's a shame they don't open source it. It's funny too, being AWS they really don't have to worry about AWS running a cheaper service, so at that point why not open source it.

If you’ve read their paper, there is a lot of detail in it to create your own. Of course they haven’t given out the code but the paper is a pretty solid design document.

Re: DynamoDB 10 years later

#190

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

yftsui wrote: post #183
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dynamo paper and DynamoDB are two very different things…

Err you're right, they re-used something that implemented the Dynamo paper (Riak) and implemented on top of it the DynamoDB API.
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