Question: What is DynamoDB used for?

Answer

Following are the top things Amazon DynamoDB is used for:

Logging

One of the most controversial use cases for DynamoDB is its use for storing application logs. Some users may argue that DynamoDB is expensive and is not an effective way to store application logs. Still, if the requirement is to only store logs in an easy-to-read and accessible mechanism, then DynamoDB is a perfect fit.

Users can send their application logs into DynamoDB and benefit from its fast, reliable, and relatively inexpensive storage. DynamoDB also brings in a unique functionality in its global tables feature. It allows a user to maintain a localized logging database for each multi-region application instance while allowing the data to reside in a single database instance without maintaining individual databases for each multi-region application instance.

Analytics

If you couple DynamoDB with a well-designed big data analytical platform, it will allow users to enrich data without worrying about resource constraints due to DynamoDB's auto-scaling feature.

In this use case, DynamoDB will store all the metrics from multiple data sources, such as IoT sensors, web applications, etc. The scalable nature of DynamoDB allows users to adapt to the fluctuations of the analytics data being sent from the data sources to manage the data cost-effectively. Native features such as Time to Live (TTL) can also allow users to handle data retention within the database without needing additional tools.

Cache

AWS provides DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), a natively compatible in-memory caching service for the DynamoDB to reduce the single-digit millisecond latency to microseconds. It is made possible by querying the much faster DAX directly when querying the database since the DAX can temporarily hold the most frequently queried items, ensuring that the request does not even have to go to the DynamoDB database.

The DynamoDB Accelerator provides its users the added advantage of reducing the latency for existing databases without making any changes on the application or the database level.

More Use Cases & Real-World Examples

If you'd like to learn about the industries where DynamoDB is used along with real world examples of how top companies are using DynamoDB, then read the DynamoDB use cases article.