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Amazon’s DynamoDB — 10 years later

- Amazon Science
Staff writer

6–8 minutes

Q.

What’s the origin story for DynamoDB, and how has the technology
evolved in the past decade?

A.

The idea behind DynamoDB developed from discussions with

customers like Don MacAskill, the CEO of SmugMug and Flickr.
More and more companies like Don’s were web-based companies,
and the number of users online was exploding. The traditional
relational database model of storing all the data in a single box was
not scaling well. It forced the complexity back on the users to shard

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their relational databases and then manage all the partitioning and
re-partitioning and so forth.

This wasn’t new to us; these challenges are why we built the
original Dynamo, but it wasn’t yet a service. It was a software
system that Amazon engineers had to operate. At some point in one
of our customer advisory board meetings, Don said, ‘You all started
Dynamo and showed what is possible with a scalable non-relational
database system. Why can't we have that as an external service?’

All senior AWS executives were there, and honestly it was a

question we were asking ourselves at the time. Don wasn’t the only
customer asking for it, more and more customers wanted that kind
of scalable database where they didn't have to deal with partitioning
and re-partitioning, and they also wanted extreme availability. This
led to the genesis of our thinking about what it would take to build a
scalable cloud database that wasn’t constrained by the SQL API.

DynamoDB was different from the original Dynamo because it

actually exposed several of the original Dynamo components via
very easy-to-use cloud controls. Our customers didn’t have to
provision clusters anymore. They could just create a table and
seamlessly scale it up and down; they didn’t have to deal with any

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of the operations, or even install a single library to operate a

database. This evolution of Dynamo to DynamoDB was important
because we truly embraced the cloud, and its elasticity and
scalability in an unprecedented manner.

Werner Vogels, vice president and chief technology officer of

Amazon.com, introduced DynamoDB on Jan. 18, 2012 with this
post in which he said DynamoDB "brings the power of the cloud to
the NoSQL database world."

We launched it on January 18th, 2012 and it was a hit right out of

the gate. Don’s company and several others started using it. Right
from the launch, not just elasticity, but single-digit latency
performance was something that resonated really well with
customers. We had innovated quite a bit, all the way from the
protocol layer, to the underlying storage layer for SSD storage, and
other capabilities that we enabled.

One of the first production projects was a customer with an

interesting use case; they were doing a Super Bowl advertisement.
Because DynamoDB was extremely elastic it could seamlessly
scale up to 100,000 writes a second, and then scale down after the
Super Bowl was over so they wouldn’t incur costs anymore. This

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was a big deal; it wasn’t considered possible at that time. It seems

super obvious now, but at that time databases were not that elastic
and scalable.

It was a bold vision. But DynamoDB’s built-for-the-cloud

architecture made all of these scale-out use cases possible, and
that is one of the reasons why DynamoDB now powers multiple
high-traffic Amazon sites and systems including Alexa,
Amazon.com, and all Amazon fulfillment centers. Last year, over
the course of our 66-hour Prime Day, these sources made trillions
of API calls and DynamoDB maintained high availability with single-
digit millisecond performance, peaking at 89.2 million requests per
second.

And since 2012, we have added so many innovations, not just for its
underlying availability, durability, security and scale, but ease-of-use
features as well.

Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS | CUBE Conversation, January

2022

We’ve gone beyond key value store and now support not just a
hash-based partition but also range-based partitioning, and we’ve
added support for secondary indexes to enable more complex

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query capabilities —without compromising on scale or availability.

We also now support scalable change data capture through

Amazon Kinesis Data Steams for DynamoDB. One of the things I
strongly believe with any database is that it should not be an island;
it can’t be a dead end. It should generate streams of what data
changed and then use that to bridge it to your analytics
applications, or other data stores.

We have continued innovating across the board on features like

backup and restore. For a large-scale database system like
DynamoDB with millions of partitions, doing backup and restore
isn’t easy, and a lot of great innovations went into making this
experience easy for customers.

We have also added the ability to do global tables so customers

can operate across multiple regions. And then we added the ability
to do transactions with DynamoDB, all with an eye on how do you
continue to keep DynamoDB’s mission around availability and
scalability?

Recently we also launched the ability to reduce the cost of storage

with the Amazon DynamoDB Standard Infrequent Access table
class. Customers often need to store data long term, and while this

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older data may be accessed infrequently, it must remain highly

available. For example, end users of social media apps rarely
access older posts and uploaded images, but the app must ensure
that these artifacts are immediately accessible when requested.
This infrequently accessed data can represent significant storage
expense for customers due to their growing volume and the
relatively high cost of storing this data, so customers optimize costs
in these cases by writing code to move older, less frequently
accessed data from DynamoDB to lower cost storage alternatives
like Amazon S3. So at the most recent re:Invent we launched
Amazon DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access table class, a new
cost-efficient table class to store infrequently accessed data, yet
maintain the high availability and performance of DynamoDB.

We are on this journey of maintaining the original vision of

DynamoDB as the guiding light, but continue to innovate to help
customers with use cases around ease of querying, the ability to do
complex, global transaction replication, while also continuing to
manage costs.

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